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Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: America did become the thing. It totally revolutionized the forms of government.

Richard Bell: My point is, he can't see the future. Can I swear? 'Cause he's making that shit up. Right? He is. I think he is blowing smoke up your ass and up my ass. And I think we love it.

Martin Luther King: Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Male Voice: You're listening to "So to Speak," the free speech podcast, brought to you by ÃÛÖ­ÏãÌÒ, the ÃÛÖ­ÏãÌÒ.

Nico Perrino: All right, folks, welcome back to "So to Speak," the free speech podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy and stories that define your right to free speech. I am your host, Nico Perrino. This month marks 250 years since Thomas Paine published "Common Sense," a pamphlet that transformed American independence from a political argument into a mass movement. Looking back on Paine's legacy, the famed orator and free thought advocate, Robert Ingersoll, put it simply, "With Paine's name left out, the history of liberty cannot be written."

Yet for more than half his life, Paine was a failure at nearly every turn. He tried his hand as a corset maker, a tax collector, a teacher, a privateer and a grocer, and had two unsuccessful marriages by age 37. In 1774, he left Britain behind and arrived in America, unknown and unsuccessful. Yet within a year, he published "Common Sense," demonstrating the power of ideas to inspire a revolution. John Adams said that without Paine's pen, the fight for American freedom may have remained a small rebellion rather than a unified revolution.

"Common Sense" became the most widely read work in American history, after the Bible. It was read aloud in taverns, on street corners, and in private homes, reshaping how ordinary people thought about independence. Adams, who often clashed with Paine – and maybe we'll get into that in this conversation – he said, "History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine." And yet, when Paine died in 1809, only six people attended his funeral. His life is a case study in not just the power of free speech, but its costs.

His obituary captured that contradiction bluntly. "Paine," it read, "did some good and much harm." Well, what was that harm? To explore Paine's rise to glory and fall from grace, we are joined by Richard Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, and author of the new book, "The American Revolution and the Fate of the World." The book reexamines the revolution through the global lens and traces how ideas echoed far beyond America, a theme Bell also explores in his aptly named lecture, "The Tragedy of Tom Paine." Professor Bell, welcome onto the show.

Richard Bell: Great to be here.

Nico Perrino: For people who know the name Thomas Paine, but not much else about him, how do you usually introduce him? He's not one of the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who you're taught about in elementary school here in the United States. He's more of a second or third tier Founding Father.

Richard Bell: Yeah, that's right. He's definitely a Founding Father, but where he sits in that formation is definitely up for grabs. I think he should be right there, front row, with the other Avengers, but somehow they put him in the back of the bus. A bit like me, and I don't want to overdo this comparison. Thomas Paine is an expat Englishman who came to America as an immigrant and built a life. There he and I have that in common. Of course, everything else, we're quite different. I'm a university professor.

Tom Paine, I think, is the free speech radical driving the American people towards a reckoning with independence. And the short part of this, Nico, is that before Tom Paine comes along and writes "Common Sense," aggrieved American colonists, upset with Britain, had been asking for a better deal from Britain. They'd been seeking redress of grievances. It's Tom Paine who flushes out the idea of independence as a solution to their grievances into the open and makes that question the talk of the town.

Nico Perrino: Was there any indication that this nuclear bomb that is Thomas Paine was about to arrive in the United States prior to his rival in, what was it, 1774? Was he this revolutionary when he was across the pond in England?

Richard Bell: Maybe in his own mind he was a revolutionary back in Britain. Maybe in his own mind there were ripples across the Atlantic that Thomas Paine was coming, but I don't think that's actually true. With no disrespect to the man, a man I greatly admire, he was a nobody in England. He was born in low middle class obscurity, in Norfolk, in eastern England, out in the country. He had, honestly, very difficult relations with his dad.

And like a lot of young boys or young men in England at the time who had difficult relations with their dad, he left home at a pretty early age, moved to the big city to put some distance between himself and his father, tried his hand at various professional occupations. His dad was a corset maker, I should probably say here. And in each and every one, I would say, he was a bit of a professional failure. No matter what he tried, it didn't really take, or his aptitudes perhaps weren't there, or maybe his focus or attention were elsewhere.

He even tried to become a sailor early in his career, and thank God he didn't, because I don't know how much you guys know about 18th century seafaring, but it can often be a death sentence. It could be a life-shortening career choice. And thank God he didn't go to sea. In fact, according to one story, he was down on the docks about to set foot on a ship called the Terrible, supposedly with a captain named Captain Death. That can't be true. It's too good of a story not to tell.

Nico Perrino: Believe the myth, as they say.

Richard Bell: Believe the myth. And that's when his estranged father said, "Okay, we don't get along, but you've gotta get off the ship, dude. We'll find some other path for you." And he did get off the ship and he didn't go to sea right away. And when he did go to sea later on, he survived. Thank God. What I'm building up to is the idea that professionally he's very unsettled. He tries different occupations. None of them really take.

He doesn't financially prosper either, by the way. He struggles and struggles and struggles. Which is to say he's discontented and he has grievances. And like many young men, of course, he looks for political explanations for his economic and social struggles. When he finds his way to a town on England's south coast, a town called Lewes, L-E-W-E-S, like the one in Delaware –

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I was gonna say, that sounds familiar.

Richard Bell: Yeah, my kids and I go there for vacation every year. It's lovely. And the one in England too, I think, is pretty nice these days. In the 18th century, it had a reputation for political radicalism. And so, by moving there, he's either choosing to embrace that or he's falling in with contemporaries in Lewes with a tradition of political radicalism, of dissenting voices, non-conformity, etc. We know he joins what we could dress up and call a debate club. It's probably making it fancier than it actually was, and it's called – it's got this amazing name. The Headstrong Club.

If you're ever looking for a rebrand here, Nico, maybe the Headstrong Club. I don't know. And so we think that's also a formative influence as he's becoming politically emboldened, more articulate, more confident. We know that he starts scribbling a few pieces here and there for local papers in Southern England. Usually not with his own name attached, which is pretty common in the 18th century, to write anonymously, to let the ideas speak for themselves and not be sort of tied down by whoever the author is. In this case a completely unknown guy.

And some of those pieces he therefore signs with pseudonyms, made up names or made up words. Maybe you will guess, Nico, what the pseudonym he chose was. He chose Common Sense as that pseudonym for some of those pieces. Already in England, seeing himself as sort of a truth teller, someone who can voice the will of the people. Now, this may be in his own mind, but that's the sort of image he's crafting for himself, but he's still a nobody, a no-name in a tiny town. And so, his life, the headline is his life is not going great.

And the much more reputable story I can share is that on one of his trips back to London he runs into someone all your listeners will know a real, A-Team Avenger Founding Father, and that's Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, of course, was one of the chief lobbyists for the American colonies lobbying members of Parliament at the time. He'd been there for several years, and he runs into the famous Benjamin Franklin on the street and says, "Are you Benjamin Franklin?" Franklin says, "Yes, but I'm trying to go to dinner. Leave me alone." He gets lots of people coming up to him every day.

And usually when English strangers come up to Benjamin Franklin on the streets of London, their questions usually go something like, "What's America like? Is it as good as it sounds? Is the land as cheap as it sounds? Are the opportunities as broad as we sometimes hear? Should I go? Do you think I'd be a good fit? Could you put in a good word, Benjamin?" And he's never met these people. They're just strangers on the street.

He's got in the habit, Nico – and this is my favorite Franklin story, perhaps – of carrying with him pre-typed out letters of introduction where he just scribbles whoever the stranger's name onto the pre-printed letter and says, "Here you go. Here's a letter of introduction. Take it to America. It will open doors when you get there." That's a very dubious claim. Franklin's famous, but he is not that famous.

Tom Paine gets one of these letters of introduction from Franklin, who he meets on the street, decides seemingly at that moment, or perhaps it's more drawn out, that maybe America is where he can turn a page, turn a corner, start afresh, and maybe start to improve on his really, I think, pretty modest economic circumstances, and maybe even expand what's starting to become a journalism career.

There is no sense, to come back to your original question, when he gets on that ship, that Thomas Paine, the tribune of independence, is finally on route.

Nico Perrino: He arrives in Philadelphia in December 1774, I believe, and he's so ill from typhus that he had to be carried off the ship, is my understanding.

Richard Bell: That's right.

Nico Perrino: He nearly didn't make it to America. It's at this time that he also changes the spelling of his last name. It was previously spelled Pain, as in P-A-I-N. Maybe that's why he wanted to got to sea on the Terrible with Captain Death. I don't know. They had something in common, but he changes it to P-A-I-N-E and he becomes an editor at Pennsylvania Magazine.

And he had this idea of magazines being a nursery of genius and a place for folks to write, to build a nation that was gonna outgrow the state of infancy. What indication do we have of why he decided to become a writer? Was he just so infatuated with his own ideas? Was it because he had this letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin who was himself a publisher in the city of Philadelphia?

Richard Bell: I think it's all those things, first of all. I'll quickly say, I love that story that he changes the spelling of his last name. Pain becomes Paine. You add the silent E. And I should say, what I like about that is it sort of symbolizes this turning of the page. There is a new chapter. On the other hand, just to puncture the balloon a little bit, this is the 18th century. People spell their names lots of different ways, and it's not as clear and consistent a break as I wish it was. Shakespeare, for instance, in an earlier period, spelled his name l6 different ways. We shouldn't go overboard on that.

Nonetheless, he is looking for a job. He's got this letter of introduction from Philadelphia's favorite son, who, as you point out, is a printer, writer, and publisher. And if Ben Franklin's letter is gonna carry any weight in Philadelphia, it's gonna be in those industries. The printing trades, the writing trades, etc. Sensibly, I think, that's where Thomas Paine concentrates his efforts to find work.

And he turns out to be the right person at the right place at the right time, because they're trying to start a new – what did you call it? Gentleman's magazine, to be called the Pennsylvania Magazine, which has all these sort of noble imperatives behind it. Sometimes, when I tell my students that Tom Paine wrote for a gentleman's magazine, they think of Playboy in the 1970s. We are reading it for the articles, I swear. This one is a gentleman's literary magazine, as you pointed out there. It does have loftier ambitions than Playboy in the '70s.

And they're looking for someone with some English cachet. It's a reminder that as far as many American colonists see it in the 18th century, Britain and London specifically is the center of the cultural universe, the cosmopolitan universe; so to have an English editor is like starting a basketball team in Hungary and getting an American player to manage it or something like that. It brings cache. It brings respectability.

Nico Perrino: Well, that's why we have you here.

Richard Bell: That's right.

Nico Perrino: You've got the accent.

Richard Bell: That's right. I think it's the meeting of interests there. And Paine is certainly looking to build on what's starting to seem like maybe a small set of talents, which he's quite proud of, coming out of his modest journalism experiences in Britain, and see if he can sort of level up and take them to the next stage. And taking charge of a fledgling publication and getting to shape it really in his own image is a dream come true.

Nico Perrino: How did his early experiences in America shape what he wrote about? Was there any indication, for example, that he was gonna be the guy that wrote "Common Sense"? Was he a burgeoning revolutionary from the moment he stepped foot here in America?

Richard Bell: I think looking back on his career in England, burgeoning revolutionary would be over-egging it somewhat. I would say the scraps of his journalism that we've been able to directly attribute to Paine – remember, much of it is anonymous or pseudonymous, so it's hard to do – does suggest a strong sort of anti-authority sort of populism or radicalism. There's plenty of anti-monarchical and anti-government pieces in his British journalism, and we're discovering more all the time.

'Cause big data tools like AI can examine a corpus of unattributed writings in British papers, or American papers for that matter, and start to say, well, these patterns in these six pieces correspond to the linguistic markers that we know are Thomas Paine's linguistic markers. It's learning more about his journalism. I would say yes, there is an anti-monarchical, anti-imperial, challenging the conventional wisdom flavor to Paine's writing; but he has not been a keen student of the American crisis until he arrives in America.

America's somewhere he's aware of, and then he moves there and suddenly he's in that political crisis in a way you can't be when you live in Southern England in 1773. I think anyone arriving in America in 1774, you cannot help but realize that there is a lot of political tumult in the air. Let's remember, on our eighth grade timeline of the American Revolution that I'm sure many of your listeners sort of carry in their in their heads, we have already done the Stamp Act and the riots and protests against those.

We've already been through the Townshend Duties of 1767, with all the coordinated boycotts of British consumer goods to protest that. We've been through 18 months of British occupation of Boston, Massachusetts, culminating in the Boston Massacre of 1770. We've just seen the Boston Tea Party and the brutal retaliatory response by the British Parliament called the Coercive Acts. And colonies far beyond Massachusetts have rallied in support of the Bostonians, who they regard as being badly mistreated by the Coercive Acts in response.

I'm saying politics is in the air. It's front page news, in a way you wouldn't really get a sense if you still lived in Southern England. Paine is quickly playing catch up on these issues. He doesn't arrive with a political agenda, I would argue, but that the agenda of living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during 1774 and 1775 quickly sort of is an oxygen he imbibes and takes on for himself, and probably, as a political writer, sees the advantage of sort of raising his own reputation, marketability, market value, by riding this tide. My God, he'll ride it. He'll virtually lead this tide.

Nico Perrino: Lexington and Concord, widely considered to be the start of the Revolution, happens in what? April 1775. He publishes "Common Sense" in January of 1776. How is the Revolution going at that moment?

Richard Bell: I love that question because it makes us think about what the word revolution is doing in a sentence like that. Because one thing folks may have forgotten since eighth grade is that when the war that we later call the Revolutionary War starts at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775, no one fighting it is seeking independence. It's not a war for independence at Lexington and Concord or any time immediately afterward.

It is a set of military engagements, a war, based around the idea that the British military is trying to suppress a rising revolt of dissatisfied colonists, and those dissatisfied colonists are revolting to seek better treatment from King George, from Parliament, from the British military commanders in America. You name it. They're looking for a better deal and they're willing to fight for a better deal from the British government. That is the sort of state of affairs throughout the first, I would say, year after Lexington and Concord.

Notice I haven't said the word independence in the last two minutes. It's not about that. It's about redress of grievances. And nonetheless, Britain is showing no signs of weakening its resolve, no signs of losing interest in utter suppression and subordination, and therefore patriots', colonists' hopes for redress of grievances aren't getting anywhere. They're being constantly frustrated and pushed back as Britain seems to send more and more troops to crush this insurgency, to nip it in the bud.

And so, there needs to be a way out of this impasse for aggrieved colonists, that you can either back down and go home with nothing, or they can ramp up to whatever the next stage of their protest might be. And the next stage of that protest doesn't have a name, doesn't have a goal. No one knows what that next stage is. I would argue, and I'm simplifying here a little bit, but not too much, that Tom Paine gives them that next stage, that leveling up.

He will say in "Common Sense," and I know we'll talk more about this, Nico, that reconciliation, redress are now impossible, and that the only thing we can realistically hope to gain by this continued armed skirmish is to break with Britain. And he gives that break with Britain a name. Independence. Now and forever, he says.

Nico Perrino: Some of it sounds, as the way you're framing it right now, sounds like as a practical concern, we just cannot redress these grievances; but in "Common Sense" he also goes for the idea of monarchy itself.

Richard Bell: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: The whole philosophical basis of British – he says it's not legitimate.

Richard Bell: Right.

Nico Perrino: It also seems like there's a fundamental philosophical problem that he has with British rule just from the get-go, regardless of how the colonists are being treated.

Richard Bell: It is certainly true that when we crack open "Common Sense" and see what he released to the world on, what was it, January 10, 1776, that that text is an anti-monarchical manifesto. And it's very clear, and I would say simple, in its points. Not just that independence is a practical solution to contemporary political problems, but that independence is righteous and is predicated on a rejection of an institution, monarchy, that is fundamentally illegitimate. I would say that "Common Sense" is proof that there is a – that there's a philosophy to "Common Sense."

There's an ideology to "Common Sense." And I think we could look at his journalism in England and say there's the beginnings of that same ideology there. And we could look ahead, which I know we'll do later on, and see that that ideology will only blossom and flower in later stages. How solid it is in Paine's heart in 1776 is hard to know. What we know is, it's solid in the pages of "Common Sense" as of January 1776. And it will be a blistering attack, not just on King George, not just on the British monarchy, but on monarchy as a governing institution. That is incredibly radical for the 18th century.

Nico Perrino: And what are the core arguments? This is a pamphlet that's more or less just a couple dozen pages long. What are the core of his arguments? Obviously it talks monarchy. He does it at kind of a general level. If I understand correctly, King George's name isn't even mentioned in the text? What else is he going for?

Richard Bell: Yeah, it's amazing. He builds up basically from first principles rather than diving readers in at the deep end and saying, "Let's get away from this guy for these three reasons." He builds up it by taking us back to the origins of monarchy, and in his formulation – I'm not saying I agree or disagree – but his formulation of monarchy is that it is predicated on force, on coercion, on conquest, on one young man unsettling and killing the previous dynasty of kings and saying he can do better than the last guy; that it's a government predicated on violence and garbed in the fabrication of the divine right of kings, that God chooses these men, and sometimes women.

And to question those men and women is to question God's choice. He says, "What hogwash." They just kill each other till one of them survives, like "Game of Thrones," the old HBO show. He's got an HBO sort of version understanding of monarchy. And so, when he depicts kings and queens of the last 1,000 years of English history, it's with no reverence whatsoever. It's refreshing lack of reverence. He doesn't just not refer to King George III by name.

He refers to him as that royal brute or that solemn pharaoh, lobbing insults at what was honestly – and this, again, may surprise some of your listeners – a pretty beloved figure at the time. Many American colonists had no love for parliament, but they had pictures of King George in their house. To come for King George, he best not miss, and he doesn't miss. He goes for everything undergirding King George's authority.

Nico Perrino: Why does he publish it anonymously? Is it for the same reasons you were articulating earlier, that he wanted folks to focus on the ideas and not so much the identity? In this case a failed corset maker who arrived in America, a failure at everything he had done?

Richard Bell: Yeah, it's hard to imagine what putting his name on would've done for sales. Not very much, I don't think. I think that's right. We don't know for sure why he makes that decision, but I will say it's a pretty conventional decision for 18th century political pamphlets.

Nico Perrino: And what was the pseudonym that he used? I don't have it in front of me.

Richard Bell: The one I have in my head is an Englishman.

Nico Perrino: That's what I have in my head as well.

Richard Bell: All it says on the cover is, "I'm an Englishman." Now, you might think, "Why doesn't it say I'm an American?" Maybe that would be the better play. My supposition here is that he is showing American readers that even Englishmen think monarchies, even some Englishmen think monarchies are illegitimate. Even some Englishmen think the colonists have a right to level up their military skirmishes with the British army; that righteousness is on the Americans' side, so says this Englishman.

Nico Perrino: Would colonists have thought of themselves as English men and women?

Richard Bell: Yeah, that's important to say. Yes. The answer is yes. Englishman isn't as quite a distinctive category as we might think today, but for a newly arrived immigrant, it's definitely a reminder that they're part of something larger.

Nico Perrino: He was writing for a general audience here. Right?

Richard Bell: Yeah, that's right.

Nico Perrino: John Adams talks about him writing in a manly style that he could never write in.

Richard Bell: What is a manly style?

Nico Perrino: I don't know. Punchy maybe is how an editor would put it today.

Richard Bell: Well, punchy is fair. He's definitely punchy. He's definitely punchy. I would say it's an accessible style. In fact, one of the things I love to do is continue to teach "Common Sense" to this day. I teach it roughly every semester at University of Maryland in College Park, where I teach American students, obviously despite this silly British accent. And I find it to be one of the most accessible 18th century and revolutionary era texts. It speaks across the ages in ways that young people today can not only understand, but also feel recognized. It's about grievances.

It's a bit like Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher in the Rye." "These jerks everywhere, let me tell you." And many scholars have pointed out that there's a lot of intentionality behind the language choices. He writes short sentences, simpler sentences. He avoids the very common habit of using as many SAT words and classical illusions as you can possibly have to show your readers how smart you are and how much better you are than them. He doesn't use footnotes.

If I'm remembering correctly, the only book he quotes is "The Book of Common Prayer" and the Bible, so two books. They're the books that most people might have had in their household, when they wouldn't have had John Locke or Sidney or whatever else on their bookshelf. He is trying to reach everyone. I would say not just the lower middle class, but everyone, actually. And he speaks with what I think of as sort of the plain-spoken language of the guy at the end of the bar and the tavern you like going to.

Nico Perrino: Well, you kind of have to, because America didn't have the literacy rate, or at that time the colonies didn't have the literacy rate that we have today. And this was gonna be a pamphlet that was gonna be read in bars and taverns.

Richard Bell: Yeah. Now, there are plenty of other pamphlets being published. I think there's – let's make up a number here – 100 other political pamphlets about the American crisis published in Philly alone in 1776. Don't write that down, 'cause I made that number up. The point is, this one will break out of that pack and become, as you pointed out in your intro, the bestselling pamphlet of the year, rivaling the Bible in sales that particular year, 1776.

Nico Perrino: And I think if you just judge it by per capita, it's still the second bestselling book or pamphlet, even today.

Richard Bell: Yeah, the estimates at the time – and maybe there's a pinch of salt required here, 'cause Tom Paine gave some of these estimates about his own pamphlets sales, and you shouldn't trust an author when they tell you how many books they've sold – is that it's sold about 100,000 copies at a time when the white population of the 13 colonies was about two million. What is that, five percent of the population? You get five percent of the American population today to read anything and you've got Harry Potter on your hands, or something like that, so a breakout hit.

Nico Perrino: And John Adams seems to be a little bit peeved that this is a success. He writes of Paine, "He is a keen writer, but he has offered nothing more" – and I quote here – "a tolerable summary of the arguments, which I had been repeating again and again in Congress for nine months."

Richard Bell: You heard the source in that quote you read, Nico. You heard the source of Adams' frustration. It's that Tom Paine is sucking up credit for arguments that John Adams says, correctly, that he's been making in public or political spaces for several months.

Nico Perrino: Was John Adams making the same arguments about monarchy? Philosophically?

Richard Bell: No, he was not. John Adams is trying to have his cake and eat it there, saying, "I'm just like 'Common Sense.'" That's probably stretching it, I think. Adams was – he will become a significant Founding Father. He will become a champion of independence, as I'll acknowledge more in a minute; but he's also a Harvard trained lawyer. He's a creature of the establishment in many ways. He doesn't tear down monarchies. That's not what he wakes up thinking about, the origins of monarchies.

He's thinking more practically about whether a particular king who's making a series of bad choices with his ministers over the last 10 years should continue to govern some colonies 3,000 miles away from London. How do you do that in an efficient, effective way? Adams says you can't. Adams is focused on much more practical, immediate grievances. Whereas Paine is launching this much more sort of ideological, philosophical attack.

Nonetheless, it is true that Paine is a popularizer of ideas, and Adams is a political animal. And in the chambers of the Second Continental Congress, he is arguably the champion of independence; but the chambers of Congress and the tavern down the street, these are two different worlds.

Nico Perrino: Did Paine make a keen study of Locke, John Locke, or Montesquieu? Where is his philosophical awakening coming from? Or is it just something he has in his gut that he puts on this paper?

Richard Bell: I think this is a question that every biographer of Tom Paine – and there's been several good ones; my favorite is John Keane – is animated by. How did this guy become this guy? Where does this ide ideology, where does the skillset come from? You've asked me some of those skillset questions already. And some of the answer is, "We're not really sure." And likewise, in terms of whether he is sort of an autodidact building this ideology piece by piece from his own experiences, or whether he is secretly scurrying home and reading every piece of political philosophy he can, it's hard to know.

Because unlike so many other Founding Fathers, his papers are not preserved in any systematic fashion. And that has everything to do with his later fall from grace that I know we'll talk about. When he dies, he is a pariah, unceremoniously cast aside. No one's sweeping in, gathering up his papers from his early life, interviewing his teachers, and then donating everything to the Library of Congress, which doesn't exist. They're not doing any of that.

There's a lot of black holes about what we don't know about what's happening inside Tom Paine's house, what's happening inside his head and what's happening inside his heart. Whereas Thomas Jefferson, we know what he had for breakfast every day of 40 years. We don't have those things with Paine, which makes him a much more enigmatic figure. We could take either position and lay out the fabric of evidence.

I would take the Occum's Razor position, the sort of most likely scenario, is that his own experiences leave him aggrieved and pushing at political structures; but that he is surrounded by, or in a cultural milieu, where other people are articulating those ideas as political philosophy. And he's literate enough, and friends with enough readers and book buyers and printers, that he probably does have secondhand access to work, to physical books, like some of the ones we mentioned.

And if he doesn't, he's certainly reading the newspapers, which are also engaged in a sort of secondhand discussion of political philosophy at the time. I don't think he's the man in the cave just coming up with all of this on his own. I think he's probably a product of the milieu he put himself in.

Nico Perrino: Last question about "Common Sense" here. He writes, "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." He also writes, "'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age. Posterity are all virtually involved in the contest, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now." He kind of understood what America would become if it won the Revolution.

Richard Bell: I love quotes like that, 'cause you can see Paine intentionally blowing up this arguably petty domestic dispute over taxes and tea into something epic and grand and world-shaking. And for us today – I'm a naturalized US citizen, despite this silly accent – for us in America today, that is a very attractive set of claims; that Paine could see what this breakaway new nation might become. He could see America in the 20th century, maybe the 21st century as well, as becoming something that the whole world has to reckon with.

Nico Perrino: Well, you would think he was blowing smoke up our asses.

Richard Bell: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: America did become the thing.

Richard Bell: Right, but my point –

Nico Perrino: It totally revolutionize the forms of government.

Richard Bell: My point is, he can't see the future. He's making – can I swear? He's making that shit up. He is. I think he is blowing smoke up your ass and up my ass. And I think we love it. I think we love it. You can see that tactic over and over again, to put this decision these colonists are wrestling with, about whether or not to try to separate from the world's most powerful empire and strike out on their own in much grander, more righteous stakes than they have any reason to actually be. It's hard for us to remember today that when Paine is doing this, there is a real split among the white population.

There are people who are emerging as what we'd call patriots, and they will be the ones who buy "Common Sense" and say, "Yeah!" And there's a hardcore population of loyalists who say, "Fuck, no," who push back ardently against everything Paine says. And there's a massive swathe of people in the middle. You can call them neutrals, which is the general term historians use today. We might call them swing voters or independents. And they haven't made up their minds. And it's that sort of language that makes them give the patriot cause a second look, I think. And they won't all break for independence, but some of them will.

Nico Perrino: British officials recognized how compelling "Common Sense" was. British officials were reporting back in England that anyone who originally disagreed with the ideas are converted after reading "Common Sense." They seemed to recognize the power of this little pamphlet here to change minds.

Richard Bell: Yeah. Britain has lots of people reporting back to leaders in London what's happening in America. 'Cause what's happening in America is increasingly tempestuous and unstable. And, yeah, the word on the street in London is that one pamphlet has broken through and it's preaching independence, a permanent break from Britain, and people are buying it and loving it. And to read those accounts that make it to Britain, you'd think that "Common Sense" is like pixie dust. Or one touch of it and you're the most ardent patriot the world's ever known.

And we have some contemporary reports which say exactly that. I think we should, again, exercise some critical judgment here, and remind ourselves that 100,000 sales is not two million sales, that if 40% of people are patriots by July of 1776, that means 60% of white people definitely are not converted to "Common Sense." To go from however many patriots there were to however many patriots there will soon become, Paine is definitely part of the accelerant, the lighter fuel for that cause.

Nico Perrino: After he publishes "Common Sense," he enlists in the Continental Army.

Richard Bell: Briefly, yeah.

Nico Perrino: And he starts writing this pamphlet series, 16 series pamphlet written over seven years, called "The American Crisis." And here you also get lines like, "These are the times that try men's souls. Tyranny, like hell," he writes, "is not easily conquered. Yet we have this constellation with us, at the heart of the conflict, the more glorious that triumph." These are words read by George Washington to the troops in its most difficult moments, inspiring them to kind of come back from tough defeats. What impact did "The American Crisis" have on the Revolution during those years? And I often forget how long the American Revolution was?

Richard Bell: Eight years, 400 weeks. It's a hell of a long time.

Nico Perrino: A hell of a long time to sustain yourself against the most powerful country in the history of the world, arguably.

Richard Bell: Yeah, it's nearly twice the length of the Civil War. It's an absolute epic, sprawling story. Begins in 1775 at Lexington Concord, ends in 1783 at the Battle of Cuddalor in Southern India. It's also globe-trotting. My new book's about the globe-trotting aspects of the work. And I love it when you quote from Tom Paine's writings, whether it's "Common Sense" or "The American Crisis. 'Cause readers, listeners of this place, this program, can hear what a good stylist he is. He can hit you. He can make you feel things. You can have all the feels listening to Thomas Paine.

There's very few 18th century writers that can give you the feels. Try reading John Adams. You will feel nothing except annoyance when you read John Adams. Anyway, where was I going with this? "The American Crisis" essays, which begin soon after the vote on independence in Congress, let's not lose sight of the fact that if "Common Sense" is published in January and it sort of gives a name to what people might want as a solution, independence, just six months later, Congress is voting on that. I think the popularity of that pamphlet has a lot to do with the coming of that vote on the timeline that it does.

Many scholars have been able to demonstrate this, this connective tissue between "Common Sense" in January and the vote in July; but the vote in July doesn't do anything. It doesn't magically change history by creating an independent republic. Try voting in Congress today and see if the world changes immediately. Or try vowing to yourself, Nico, that now I'm a billionaire and snapping your fingers and see if it works. It doesn't work. It's just a vote with a press release, which we call the Declaration of Independence, accompanying it.

There's a war to win in the meantime. If you want independence to be real, you need to win the war. And the patriots are losing that war throughout 1776. They're losing it on July 3. They're losing it on July 4. They're losing it on July 5 and onward and onward and onward. In fact, I would argue the fall of 1776 is perhaps the darkest six month period of the war, the time in that chronology when the patriots' hopes for victory look most fragile, most reversible, most likely to collapse upon themselves.

And so, people are deserting, the Continental Army ranks in unprecedented numbers. They'd rushed into that army in September 17 – in June of 1775, saying, "We'll win the win this war. We're back home by Christmas." And they're still slogging with no end in sight more than a year later. They're all going back to their farms, deserting. George Washington's Continental Army is at one point down to 5,000 guys, and Britain's just reinforced with 30,000 people.

And so, they need – and I'm soft-pedaling this as much as I can – a pick-me-up, and Tom Paine's decision to write "The American Crisis" essays is part of his effort to try to boost patriot morale, to try to staunch the bleeding of desertions from Washington's army. Which is why Washington reads these extraordinary essays, or some of them, at least, to the actual troops, so they can hear them. "These are the times that try men's souls." Sunshine patriots will go home to their families when the going gets tough, but winter soldiers will stick it out.

Which literally means don't quit now, at least stay through the winter. And he writes 16 of these, as you point out. I would say the first two or three are the most impactful. He actually, ironically, leaves the army himself. He's a terrible soldier. And he realizes that what his role instead is, is as the penman of independence, the chief propagandist, the chief booster for that cause. And that's hugely valuable work.

Nico Perrino: And it's recognized by the new country. New York State awards him a 300 acre farm in New Rochelle. Congress provides a $3,000 supplemental gift. Congress subsequently asks him to write the history of the American Revolution, which he declined to do so, and speaks a little bit to the tragedy of Tom Paine, of how he's represented in that history of the Revolution.

Richard Bell: By the people that do write it, yes.

Nico Perrino: By the people that do write it. We'll get to that in a little bit. And then the Revolution ends, what, 18 –

Richard Bell: 1783.

Nico Perrino: And he leaves the next year for – or he leaves five years later.

Richard Bell: Mm-hmm.

Nico Perrino: Excuse me. In 1788, to move back to London. Why does he move back to London? What's his life like between the end of the Revolution and that year?

Richard Bell: Yeah. Nothing we've said in this conversation would set listeners up for the idea that after Revolution is won, he goes to London. That doesn't make any sense.

Nico Perrino: Or why they would even let him back into London.

Richard Bell: Or why they'd even let him back in. Passport control at Heathrow Airport might have some questions for him. There's a couple of things going on here. The first is economic. Despite those gifts you mentioned from the State of New York, for instance, he's not hugely wealthy. He's donated most of the money he made on "Common Sense" to the Continental Army.

Nico Perrino: I failed to mention that, yeah.

Richard Bell: And make sure that everyone knows he did that for brownie points, as we call it in in Britain. And so, he's not hugely wealthy. He's looking for the next gig, and he's got this extraordinary idea that he's gonna kick start American infrastructure. He's gonna build a shiny new bridge, a bridge like no one's ever seen before, over the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia.

Nico Perrino: Infrastructure Week.

Richard Bell: Infrastructure Week. It actually arrives in the sense he's got plans, and he's now going and looking for funds. Now, you would think he might approach the State of Pennsylvania or the federal government. They do not have a pot to piss in. They are broke, broke, broke, broke, broke.

Nico Perrino: Schuylkill River is there. It runs through Philadelphia.

Richard Bell: There you go. Right through, Philly. Yep. He goes where the money is for any infrastructure project, which is European investors. He goes on basically a venture capital hunt, and the money is in London, so he goes to London looking for money. It's not political. It's economic in that sense. The political part of his decision to move to London is a reminder of his political ideology, and that is he is convinced that he is so good at dismantling ties to monarchy that "Common Sense" has proved what a gifted ideologue and writer he is, that he can do this anywhere.

He can repeat the success of the American Revolution. He goes to London, in part to resume his political writing career and to write a piece of political literature for the British market, for British consumers, that will do for British politics what "Common Sense" did for American politics. He's hoping that in London lightning will strike twice.

Nico Perrino: I'm sure the monarchy was very happy to have him back.

Richard Bell: Thrilled to see him, right?

Nico Perrino: Yeah, so he publishes his next great work, which is "The Rights of Man," which is the English version of "Common Sense" in that respect. They aren't happy about this. It is another big success. It sold something like 50,000 copies in three months, and the government during this time passes laws to limit speech rights and imprison anybody who challenged the King or Parliament.

It funded a smear campaign against Paine, and in December of 1792, the government put him on trial in absentia. At this point, he had moved away, because of the smear campaign and the targeting he got. And he was sentenced to exile. He would never return to Britain. What was he arguing in "The Rights of Man" that really pissed them off? Was it another attack against monarchy?

Richard Bell: It was.

Nico Perrino: Was there anything new here?

Richard Bell: In many ways there wasn't much new. And Paine, by the way, amongst political scientists, is not known for the originality of his thought. He's known for his ability to platform and popularize dissenting traditions. There is a long tradition of dissenting political thought in English and British politics dating back centuries. Remember, in England there'd been a civil war where the king had been dethroned and had his head chopped off, in 1649, creating an English republic for 11 years, which collapsed. This is the story of Oliver Cromwell.

And there'd been a political science discourse around republicanism with a small R, the embrace of a republic as an alternative to monarchy, for centuries. When Paine writes "The Rights of Man" in 1791 and publishes it in London, saying, "We should try again for a republic; I think monarchies are illegitimate and unjust, and I think working people will do better under a republic, where they have a say and there's consent of the governed," he's actually drawing on a pretty well established well of English political thought, as he was for "Common Sense," ironically, as well.

Once again, he does so with the popularizer's zeal, with the tavern-goers sort of lingo and argot, which makes him much more dangerous than any John Locke risen from the grave to write another pamphlet that nobody reads. People read "The Rights of Man," and that's what makes him dangerous here. As you pointed out in your question, Nico, the British government under – if I'm remembering correctly – William Pitt, the younger, after the war, freaks out, realizing the clear and present danger to the permanence of their political institutions, beginning with the monarchy, that "The Rights of Man" represents.

'Cause they've seen it work in America 10 years earlier. And I should briefly pause here to hit the free speech point here, which is that up until now, up until 1791, when these events take place, England had prided itself on a free speech tradition. Even in colonial America during the Revolution, the British government is not really censoring political speech. It's not burning patriot printing presses. Ironically, it's usually the patriots who burn loyalist printing presses.

The British government prides itself and sees its own reputation in the world as being tied to Protestantism, prosperity, naval power, and to some degree civil liberty and free speech as well. And then when Paine writes "Rights of Man," the British government loses its bottle and rolls that all back to pass a series of homeland security measures designed to silence dissenting speech, namely Tom Paine's dissenting speech, and those of his increasingly loud and vocal number of acolytes.

And he is smeared in the government-supported elements of the British press, which is generally a pretty free press. Mad Tom they call him in the tabloids. There are death threats. There are government agents trailing him around London. This is how the British government shows respect to how powerful a figure Tom Paine has become in trans-Atlantic radical politics.

Nico Perrino: Was what he published illegal at the time? Did he think he was doing something illegal? Did he know he was doing something illegal?

Richard Bell: I don't know the answer to that question, so I'm gonna take a swing here and say no.

Nico Perrino: Because the concept of the freedom of speech has changed over time. There's this Blackstonian idea that it only applied to prior restraints. It's like you could publish whatever you want, but that didn't prevent you from being punished after you had published it. This goes back to John Milton's "Areopagitica," for example, and the Licensing Act. What was he doing here that might have been illegal?

Richard Bell: I don't think he thought he was breaking the law. Like most political writers, he doesn't want to go to jail. He doesn't want to die today. Who gets up thinking, "I'd like to be hanged today"? Not me. I think he thinks he's operating within the bounds of protected speech. And he's caught flatfooted by the government's willingness to sort of shift the goalposts in response to what they perceive the threat to be. Your own research probably goes deeper than I can on some of these topics, so I'm not gonna profess expertise on this.

Nico Perrino: And he goes to France. And is that because he published "The Rights of Man"?

Richard Bell: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: And he's being pursued in this way?

Richard Bell: Yeah, that's right. He's definitely being hounded out of England, because there are murder threats. There are death threats. The Times of London, which when I was growing up in the '80s was quite a respectable newspaper, before certain Australian media magnets bought it – in the 18th century, it says basically, "Fuck off to France if you like radicalism so much." He does. He fucks off to France to avoid being killed while he's walking out in the streets of London.

As you pointed out in your remarks, he's nonetheless then put on trial on some very trumped up charges in London while he's not there. The defendant's dock is empty and they find him guilty and sentenced him to hang, so he has to stay away from London thereafter. And the other part of this, of course, is to think about the timing. "Rights of Man" is 1791. What do we all know about what's happening across the English Channel in the late 1780s, early 1790s? The French Revolution has begun.

Do we think Tom Paine, the transatlantic radical, supports the early phases of the Revolution? We do, and we're correct. He does. He sees the early phases of the French Revolution as being just what he'd hoped to kick start in England and what he'd successfully, he believed, kick started in America a decade earlier. He's very comfortable going to France. In fact, and I think this is maybe funnier than your listeners will, there is a job waiting for him in the Revolutionary Assembly of France, in the Parliament, as member of Parliament for Calle.

"Come and be a member of Parliament for Calle. Okay, you're not French. You don't speak French. You're English, but you've lived in America, but would you like to be our MP?" And there's a job waiting for him with a little salary as well. It's a soft landing initially when he arrives in revolutionary France in 1791.

Nico Perrino: You speak of the Revolution initially. I know when we think of the French Revolution these days, we often think of the guillotine dropping; but at that time, this was a cause of many small L liberals. They saw this as becoming the next American Revolution –

Richard Bell: That's right.

Nico Perrino: –with these high-minded ideals. Talk to us a little bit about what's happening in France at that time that he arrives.

Richard Bell: Now, let's be clear, folks. I'm not an expert on the French Revolution. I teach American history in College Park. If you're a French historian out there, just close your ears for a couple of minutes or grade on a curve here. My understanding is that, yes, the French Revolution transforms in its political and social objectives in a way that the American Revolution does not. The American Revolution's goals by and large are a political regime change from a monarchy to a republic.

What the American Revolution is not is a social revolution. It does not put the poorest at the top of the social hierarchy. In fact, we see the social hierarchy largely preserved, and rich landowners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington become some of the first presidents of the United States. Its political goals are radical, but its social goals are much more conservative.

The French Revolution, regardless of how it starts, quickly metastasizes into not only a radical political revolution to throw off monarchy, like the American Revolution, but also into a radical social revolution, to literally chop off the top 10% of the French population using the guillotine. The numbers are wrong here, but 40,000 French aristocrats and military veterans are killed on the guillotine by industrial-scale murdering of the social and political elite there. For French small L liberals who've embraced the start of the Revolution as a sister revolution to the American political revolution, they freak out and they lose their heads, literally.

The Marquis de Lafayette is the perfect example here. The Marquis de Lafayette, who we all know is one of George Washington's right hand men during the American Revolution, is one of the first people to encourage this political revolution in France.

Nico Perrino: He was a French general.

Richard Bell: Yes, that's right. And then when French aristocrats and military men start getting their head cut off by radicals like Robespierre, who want to see social revolution, Lafayette has to run for his life to avoid getting his head chopped off, and flees to the Netherlands, where he's imprisoned. What I'm saying here is the French Revolution changes from something that seems like the American Revolution to something that seems much more dangerous and uncontrollable than the French Revolution. And Tom Paine has to figure out what he thinks about that.

Nico Perrino: He's invited there. He's given a seat in the Parliament, but he soon wears out his welcome because he believes that Louis XVI should be banished, not executed.

Richard Bell: Correct.

Nico Perrino: And this pisses off his colleagues.

Richard Bell: Yeah. The growing radicalism of the French National Assembly, the growing, I would say, blood-thirstiness of some of the leaders of the French Revolution, by the time Robespierre is seizing power, the Reign of Terror is starting, that does not sit well with Thomas Paine. That's not what he signed up for, to cut people's heads off.

He takes the extraordinary step of standing up in this increasingly radicalizing rabid sort of Parliament and say, "Calm down, lads. Calm down, lads. We can do this without bloodshed. King Louis XVI, he should be exiled. He should not be the king anymore, but I don't want to see his head or his queen's head separated from their shoulders. That's just nonsense violence and should not be condoned."

And that position, which is a principled position, does not make him any friends in that assembly. In fact, it costs him his job and he's soon – just to jump ahead a little bit – he'll soon be imprisoned, basically, for not being radical enough during the Reign of Terror.

Nico Perrino: Well, let's jump ahead to that time, 'cause it's around this time that he writes his third great work. If we're looking at "Common Sense," "The Rights of Man," and then "The Age of Reason." And this, whereas the "Common Sense" and "The Rights of Man" were attacks on political institutions, "The Age of Reason" is attack on organized religion. And this is really what starts to piss off people everywhere.

Richard Bell: Yeah, "The Age of Reason" is complicated here, so let's try and get it right and bear in mind, I'm not by no means an expert on this. You're absolutely right, Nico. The third great work he will publish in the mid-1790s is "The Age of Reason, Part One." And that is written exactly in the context you and I have just been talking about. One of its goals is to sort of put the brakes on this seemingly out of control, bloody Reign of Terror consuming France, and say, "I didn't sign up for this. I think things have gone too far."

And his critique of the most radical elements of that French Revolution under the Reign of Terror is that is that atheism has seized control of Jacobin leaders. And because they've lost sight of God, that's why they're cutting everyone's heads off. I'm not passing judgment on any arguments here. I'm just repeating them as I understand them here.

It's a critique of the radical religious beliefs – atheism, which was considered radical in the 18th century – of the Jacobin leaders. In the course of critiquing atheism as a lighter fuel for anarchy, he also makes other religious beliefs known, perhaps for the first time in his public career. And his religious beliefs can perhaps be characterized as unusual. He is what many scholars would call a deist. Thomas Jefferson was a deist, by the way.

Nico Perrino: Many Founding Fathers were.

Richard Bell: Yeah. David Hume was, Edward Gibbon was. Franklin flirted with it himself. Deist is sort of the idea that there is a divine creator of the universe, but he's a watchmaker who after making the watch, winds it up, and then steps away. And then the mechanism makes its own course, and he does not interfere in the daily business of humans. Deism is not very common among working people. It's easily caricatured as atheism, which it's definitely not.

And the leaders of organized churches in any country – France, Britain, the United States – the Anglican church, the Methodist Church, see deism as sufficiently different from organized religion as to be a threat to it. And in Tom Paine's case, they're right. 'Cause the other plank of Tom Paine's religious philosophy is – let's remind ourselves, he's against atheism, he embraces deism.

And the third plank is, he's very suspicious, as you pointed out, of organized religion, of church hierarchies. Whether that be the Catholic church, whether that be the Church of England, it doesn't matter. He thinks church hierarchies are toxic bureaucracy.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, he writes, "The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologist accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue. And it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud."

Richard Bell: The amphibious fraud. Think about what he's doing there. He's not only critiquing French radicals who like to cut people's heads off, he's also critiquing the leaders of organized churches in Britain and America, the two places where he's built his career thus far. This is a man burning three bridges at once.

Nico Perrino: My characterization, when I was introducing "The Age of Reason," was slightly off in that it is a political argument, and it threads religion through that.

Richard Bell: Right.

Nico Perrino: And through that thread, he reveals some things about his own beliefs.

Richard Bell: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Including that he doesn't like organized religion and that he's a deist, that really start to piss people off. And it's not that other people don't believe these things, and it's not known that people believe these things. It's that Tom Paine's the writer for a popular audience.

Richard Bell: Yeah, he's the man with the bullhorn. And men with bullhorns shouldn't be allowed to say such incendiary things about the dangers of organized religions. And if such men with such bullhorns do say these things, then they'll be made to pay a price by people in power.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, it would've been okay if he was just a man of letters speaking to other men of letters.

Richard Bell: That's right. Thomas Jefferson writing to some duke in Austria, no one cares.

Nico Perrino: Is my understanding correct that he kind of had to smuggle "Age of Reason, Part One," just very quickly to someone else to get it published before he was thrown in prison?

Richard Bell: Yeah. My version of that story – and again, there are different stories here – is that he finishes the draft of "The Age of Reason, Part One" – I say Part One 'cause there'll eventually be a sequel. He finishes the draft of "The Age of Reason" about 6:00 and gets it off to the printers to start the publishing process, just six hours before French police representing the radical French government come to his door and arrest him for not being radical enough, and throw him – and for his anti-atheist screed – throw him into political prison, a former royal palace, the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

And he is by some accounts scheduled to be executed, along with many other political prisoners, by the way. In one version of this story, guards are going down the line of cells and they're putting giant chalk X's on the doors of those people who the government has decided to execute over the next week. And because Tom Paine's cell door is open at the time, the guard comes past.

He's still in there. He's not escaping. They screw up and they put the chalk X on the inside of the door rather than the outside, so when the executioner is come knocking, he skips over Tom Paine. The point is, Tom Paine is very close to being executed for all this stuff in revolutionary Paris.

Nico Perrino: Tom Paine's pretty pissed off that America's not getting him out of prison. Right?

Richard Bell: Yeah, where's the cavalry here?

Nico Perrino: He petitions James Monroe, George Washington, to try and help him get out, and he eventually does get out. And he returns to an America that isn't really grateful for this guy that many consider responsible for helping it become the country that it became.

Richard Bell: That's right. We're now in 1802, which is the date when he comes back. I think it's 1802. Is that right?

Nico Perrino: Yeah. October 1802.

Richard Bell: I'm glad I was right about that. Good. He comes back to the US – Baltimore, I think, first of all – in 1802. And so, by that time, he has finally escaped political prison, when James Monroe, the US Ambassador to France, belatedly –

Nico Perrino: Monroe Doctrine.

Richard Bell: Yeah. Gets him out of that prison, but all Tom Paine can think about is why it took so damn long to get him out of there, given the services he'd rendered to the patriots during the war. And he holds George Washington, the previous commander-in-chief, the recent president, as responsible for not getting him out sooner. And he writes this while he's still in Paris, after the Revolution. He writes this poison pen letter about how George Washington sucks and why he didn't help him, and all the character flaws of America's favorite Founding Father, and it gets published in the American papers.

You can see why no one was inviting him back anytime soon. He just critiqued George Washington in the American newspapers, calling him soulless, incompetent, negligent, you name it. It's also worth saying that ever since Tom Paine left America – what is it, the 1780s or so – his doings, first in England and then in revolutionary France, have continued to make news in the American papers. Americans know what he's been doing. They especially know he ended up as a radical MP in the French National Assembly.

And he is smeared, I would say, in many conservative outlets in the American media, which have strong ties to churches, like the Episcopal Church or the Methodist Church, as being a godless heathen, which he definitely is not. Or with being a deist, which is fair enough, but still a not popular thing to be in America; and as being someone who egged on the French Revolution, which I think is misreading his actual role in the French Revolution.

In the American papers throughout the 1790s, Nico, he is rendered increasingly as a caricature, but also as a demon who wants leveling and anarchy and total chaos at a time when American politics is moving rapidly in the other direction. American politics in the 1790s is a search for order, a search for legitimacy in the world, trying to be taken seriously by great powers in Europe. They don't want to be associated with radicalism anymore. That's the old story from the revolutionary generation. Their new story is the Constitution.

Their new story is order and hierarchy. We're also at the start of the second great awakening, where more and more people will embrace forms of Christianity, which make no room for deists like Tom Paine as well. When he does come back, the American media would have it like the Antichrist has arrived.

Nico Perrino: What is he doing in those years then in America?

Richard Bell: That's a good question. Well, he's burned his bridges in England. He's burned his bridges in France. He considers America his home, so he's coming home, in that sense. He's also sick and ill. He's got a festering wound from his time as a political prisoner that won't actually heal, so he needs medical care. He also thinks – and this is the ego, I think – that he can pick up his pen again and be useful, that he can champion what's left of the democratic impulses of the revolution in the 1790s, and make a difference. And I should remind your listeners that by the 1790s, we're starting to see parties emerge in American politics.

There's two main parties. There's the Federalist Party, led by his old enemy, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and that's the party of order and power and central government, by and large. And there's the very confusingly named opposition, the Democratic Republicans. I told you it was confusing. And they are the opposite of the Federalists. They are for a small federal government.

They think states should have the power. They think people should have the power, rather than politicians. And Tom Paine sees them as sort of the inheritors of the revolution he fought for in America in the 1770s. He starts writing for Democratic Republican papers, and quite frankly, they wish he would stop.

Nico Perrino: Thomas Jefferson had a role to play in helping to bring him back, but Thomas Jefferson wasn't the biggest fan of Tom Paine. I read somewhere that there's a story that he had a defaced portrait of Paine at his estate with holes in the eyes and stab marks in the chest. Are you familiar with this?

Richard Bell: I do know that story and I'm not gonna pin it on Jefferson himself. My version of that story, Nico, is to say I think Jefferson, of all the Founding Fathers, is probably the one who was most friendly, actually, with Tom Paine. John Adams hated him as you, as you already heard. Jefferson, pretty sympathetic. Jefferson commissions a portrait of Tom Paine in 1787, when they're both living in Europe.

Thomas Jefferson collects portraits of celebrated men, and there's certainly no one more notorious, and if you're a Democrat sort of celebrated, than Thomas Paine, the hero of the Revolution spreading people powered stuff around Europe.

Nico Perrino: Jefferson was a supporter of the French Revolution in his early years.

Richard Bell: In the early stages, just like Paine, and then Jefferson, like Paine, backs the hell off when everyone gets their head cut off. The two men have a lot in common, actually. And we think that Thomas Jefferson's portrait of Thomas Paine took pride of place on the walls of Monticello while Jefferson was alive. To skip forward, we know that in the 1820s – this is after Jefferson's died – they're selling off lots of his stuff at Monticello. And one of those lots has Tom Paine's picture in it.

And by then it's got those stab marks in the chest and the pinholes in the eyes, suggesting to me that the portrait was taken down after Jefferson died and stored somewhere very unsafe and very lacking in care, and that young kids in his household had a field day with that portrait of Tom Paine, suggesting metaphorically that Tom Paine's star fell rapidly in this period.

Nico Perrino: He was born in 1737. He arrives back in America at the age of, what, 55?

Richard Bell: Yep.

Nico Perrino: In 1802.

Richard Bell: Let's add a decade. Let's say 65, I think.

Nico Perrino: Sixty-five.

Richard Bell: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Oh, okay. My math isn't great.

Richard Bell: Yeah, mine too.

Nico Perrino: Especially on the spot there. Okay, so he arrives back in America. He's attacking the Federalist parties. He's defending the Democratic Republicans. He tries to vote in a local election in, what, 1806 and is denied the right to vote and told that he is not an American citizen. And the question I have always had is, what was he a citizen of, if not America at that point? He was exiled from Britain. He has to flee France. He comes back to America, which, as you say, he sees as his home.

Richard Bell: Right.

Nico Perrino: He can't vote in America.

Richard Bell: I've not seen good scholarship on that particular episode. It would great make for a great Master's thesis. Maybe I'll recommend it to one of my students, but the point it raises, yeah, is about what does it mean to be a citizen in the 18th century world. I think citizen today is one of those words where we think we know what it means, but when you press people, you get lots of different answers as to what a citizen is. Does it does it mean you have the right to vote? Does it mean you have the right to run for office? Does it affect your taxes? Whatever, whatever.

And we should remind ourselves that it's much more sort of fudge-able in the 18th century. There are naturalization laws in various places which we can look to for some guidance, but there's not much consistency to them. There's a naturalization law passed by the British Empire in the 1740s, way back in British America days, which says if you're from, let's say, Germany or Sweden, and you move to colonial America, you have to stay there a certain number of years. And then to be naturalized, you basically need to pay a small fee and pledge allegiance to the king and to the Protestant church.

Which, of course, makes it a disincentive for Catholics and Jews and people of other backgrounds. The US will make up its own naturalization laws. The one I'm thinking of is 1790. And all I will say is, whatever its provisions were, Tom Paine wasn't there at the time. When he comes back in 1802, you can imagine some anti-Paine bureaucrat or office holder saying, "Let's use the fact that he didn't go through the formal process of naturalization per the 1790 Act as a way to send a political message that we don't want your type here."

What Paine made of that would be interesting to think about, because as you and I both said, he considers America home. And he's recognizing he's sick and at the end of his life. He knows this is where he will probably die, but America doesn't seem to want him anymore.

And so, the only other alternative then is to see him not really as a citizen of America – certainly not of Britain, where he's been drummed out, or France, where he was a political prisoner – but to see him as sort of as a stateless actor, to see him as – and I'm gonna use a sort of euphemistic phrase – a citizen of the world. Certainly he's a transatlantic radical who felt like it was his mission to be placed on this Earth, to spread a certain political gospel around the Atlantic Rim; so maybe there's something fitting in the fact that no one really wanted him, and he became stateless.

Nico Perrino: He dies on June 8, 1809. What were those last years or last days like? You have a piece of literature that you give out when you give your lecture on the tragedy of Tom Paine from a Madam Bonneville, where she talks about those last days, where people visited upon him who are trying to convince him to believe in a Christian God, for example, and to his dying breath he rejects it.

Richard Bell: Yeah, in the way they understand it. That's right.

Nico Perrino: In the way they understand it. He requested to be buried by Quakers, but was also rejected there. And as scholarship has gone to show, many of his papers were lost, his bones were lost. And as I mentioned in the introduction, only six people attended his funeral. And as I believe Ingersoll said, a couple of them were people who just lived on the bounty of the dead. What do we make of that?

Richard Bell: Yeah. His last few days, hours, weeks, months, I think, are agony. They're physically painful. He's crippled by gout or painful swelling of the joints. He's got other ailments. We think he was a habitual alcoholic by this stage of his life. I don't want to cast dispersions. I'm just trying to be as neutral as possible. He struggled with addiction, perhaps, at the end of his life. Is certainly caricatured as a drunk as well. He's a sick man in many ways. He's also, sadly, a friendless man by the end of his life as well. Because to be seen with Tom Paine is to set your political career on fire by the 1800s.

Nico Perrino: And to be clear, this is because largely of "The Age of Reason"?

Richard Bell: Yes. This is because, well, it's because of "The Age of Reason." It's because radicalism has become a dirty word in American politics, because American politics is increasingly religiously inflected and socially conservative. And Paine doesn't have any truck with any of that, so he's a man out of time, at least in terms of American politics. He's a man out of time. He is spat at and hissed at on the streets. There are threats against him. I will still say not every American hates him.

There are plenty of working class Americans who see him as their continued champion, sort of a Bernie Sanders figure today, who's been with them from the beginning sort of thing. And even over the last 200 years, while Paine's reputation was in the toilet at the macro level, for most of those 200 years, among working people the Paine societies and Paine dinners and Paine toasts continued. He did leave a legacy for, I think, working class populism that has never really vanished. The point is, his last few days were agony. He'd been raised in a Quaker household.

I don't think we mentioned that when we started this conversation. His dad was a Quaker, so it made some sense that he asked the Quakers if he could be buried in their burial ground. For the Quakers, one of the most, we think of as stereotypically inclusive groups, to deny him is just a testament to how poisonous any association with Paine had become. He is buried, if I'm remembering correctly, under a tree on the 300 acre estate up in New Rochelle that the State of New York had donated to him all those years ago for kick-starting the independence movement. And yet it's an easy to find place.

It's really not that hard. And yet six people show up. No political leaders of any type show up, according to some accounts. The only words spoken are by his French immigrant housekeeper. I like the fact that she's both French and an immigrant there. And her American son. There's sort of a transatlantic story, and the two people who do tend to him on that last day –

Nico Perrino: And this is the Madam Bonneville?

Richard Bell: Bonneville is the French immigrant housekeeper.

Nico Perrino: Bonneville.

Richard Bell: Her son, I think his name – Benjamin.

Nico Perrino: And you have this excerpt on your website.

Richard Bell: Yeah, I think so.

Nico Perrino: Where I saw it.

Richard Bell: Yeah. Yeah. People could definitely come and email me for that if they can't find it. And so, she and Benjamin basically bury him, and she stands at one end of the grave site and her son stands at the other end, while four pall bearers put the coffin in the ground. And she says to her American-born son, "Go, you stand there at that end as the lone representative of all that America owes to this man." This is a time when most Americans are not ready to say they owe anything to Tom Paine anymore. When I talk about Paine in public, I call the lecture "The Tragedy of Thomas Paine," and I hope you can hear the tragic notes in these last few moments.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, said, "Where liberty is, there is my country." Paine responded, "Where liberty is not, there is my country." It seems to be a good encapsulation of what his life was.

Richard Bell: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Even if you think about his death, he returns to a country that had started to become established, that didn't really need him anymore. I think he saw England as needing him when he went there. He saw France as needing him when he went there. Even America, when he writes "Common Sense," needs him for the revolution. But in 1809, America doesn't need him anymore.

Richard Bell: Doesn't think they need him. Paine certainly thought that America did need him at that last final act, and he was willing to give his last measure of devotion to the American people to try to steer them back to the promise of what he saw as the radicalism of the American Revolution, a radical political tradition that as he saw it had been sort of overwhelmed and obscured by the fanatically strong central government put in place by the Constitution, Constitutional Convention, in 1787.

It's just a reminder to listeners that while all of us today, I think, venerate the Constitution in different ways – and I've sworn oath to it when I became a citizen, I think, if I remember correctly – most of what we venerate about the US Constitution was not in the original package of 1787. Either comes to us through the Bill of Rights, like protections for freedom of speech, which have to be fought for in later generations. Or it comes to us through the Reconstruction.

There are amendments, like 13th, 14th, 15th, or the 19th Amendment, women's right to vote, etc. There were many radical activists of Paine's stripe in the 1780s and '90s who saw the Constitution as a dangerous threat to democracy, not its flowering. And so, Paine, at least, thought there was more work to do.

Nico Perrino: Adams said to Jefferson, "I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last 30 years than Tom Paine." And he lamented that the latter part of the 18th century would be known as the Age of Reason. He said it should probably be called the Age of Paine. Do you think that's right?

Richard Bell: I think it is high time we took Tom Paine seriously and gave him a second –

Nico Perrino: There's not even a monument to him in Washington, DC.

Richard Bell: It's astonishing. It's astonishing.

Nico Perrino: There's an effort to create one, I know.

Richard Bell: Not enough people want to claim him even today, and yet we're quite happy to claim "Common Sense," his first work. I just encourage folks to reengage with Tom Paine and see if Tom Paine speaks to them, to you, across the centuries. Maybe you'll find something that resonates with you in "The Age of Reason" or "The Rights of Man" or "Common Sense," or in another work we haven't talked about from the 1790s, "Agrarian Justice," where he lays out a sort of seven part proposal for what we'd recognize as the welfare state today.

And for an 18th century person to think in terms about what government can do for you is really astonishing. I think Paine speaks to us in different ways today, and we should probably take a listen.

Nico Perrino: Many of the people who claim that we should take him more seriously also say that he doesn't have all the baggage that some of the other Founding Fathers did, that he was ahead of his time. You mentioned "Agrarian Justice" and his advocacy for social welfare programs, but also people claim that he was a progressive advocate, at least for his time, for women's rights or for abolition of slavery.

I know we talked a little bit before that, so it's a little bit more complicated on some of those notes; but I think it's fair to say generally that he doesn't have some of the same personal baggage that a Thomas Jefferson would have, despite writing the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal." He was a slave-holding man.

Richard Bell: Yeah, I think that's right. I think Paine's progressive politics are visceral and permanent, and you can love him or hate him for holding those convictions decade after decade. Beyond the central objective of trying to ensure that the consent of the governed is the central governing political structure of Britain, France, and the United States, he also seems – and let's hit that word again, seems – to be progressive on women's rights, by the standards of a white man in the 18th century; and seems to hold anti-slavery principles.

I say seems there because so much of the writing that's been attributed to Paine, which would score him those points, was anonymous writing or pseudonymous writing. And we're still using tools to try to correctly attribute certain pieces of writing to him or to other authors. There are pieces which we've long thought are by Paine which we can definitely see a sort of 18th century proto-feminism in them.

For instance, trying to expand women's access to divorce, for instance, and we can also see writings critiquing the transatlantic slave trade and other aspects of racial slavery, which we've attributed to Paine. Whether those attributions hold remains to be seen, but certainly it would be in line, I think, with some of his other principles.

Nico Perrino: And this spring, Princeton University has announced that it's releasing a groundbreaking collection of Paine's writing that will include, as it says, 400 newly discovered works. I don't know that it's quite clear what those discovered works are, or whether they're these sort of anonymous or pseudonymous works that we now believe through AI and other tools can be properly ascribed to him. There are also some mumblings within the scholarly community that Thomas Paine might have had something to do with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence?

Richard Bell: Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.

Nico Perrino: How much credibility is that? And if I'm correct, it's Roger Sherman's draft copy of the Declaration contains an inscription that potentially demonstrates T. Paine's, Thomas Paine's involvement. Somewhere on it, it just says TP.

Richard Bell: TP, right. Yeah. Toilet paper. It's obvious.

Nico Perrino: Toilet paper. Acknowledging a contribution from TP in some way.

Richard Bell: Yeah. That Princeton collection I'm looking forward to with some enthusiasm, because the prospect of 400 previously unattributed works, which we can pour through with some certainty, perhaps thanks to big data, that Paine is the author, is really exciting. That could be the sort of unattributed or pseudonymous pieces we've been talking about already. Or maybe the folks there have discovered a cache of his private writings that weren't previously published and somehow survived. That's a bit remarkable, given the pariah status he was in when he died; but people, historians, do make new discoveries –

Nico Perrino: And a lot of his stuff was lost to a fire.

Richard Bell: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: He had started working on an autobiography, if I'm not mistaken?

Richard Bell: That's right. That's right. Yeah. We don't have that problem with George Washington, where there's 42 thick volumes of everything he did every day. He was also one of the most mobile Founding Fathers, literally bouncing around from place to place. Now imagine taking all your papers with you in the world before the iCloud. This sounds very exciting to me, and I hope it maybe expands our understanding of who he was. This other discovery, equally exciting.

A few years ago they discovered a manuscript copy, handwritten copy, of the Declaration of Independence, which they were able to attribute to the ownership of Roger Sherman, one of the five members of the committee that drafted the Declaration, alongside Jefferson and Adams and Livingston and Franklin, are the other members. And we think that's Roger Sherman's sort of working copy from June, when Jefferson's literally writing and editing the damn thing, and before they presented to Congress.

And on the back of this handwritten document, someone has written something like, "For TP," or, "Show TP," or something like that. And the supposition among very excited scholars is that TP might not be toilet paper, that it might be Thomas Paine, and that Thomas Paine, who was not serving in the Continental Congress, who was about, or already was, a continental soldier at the time, that they should show him this draft of this press release they've been working on because it's sort of the manifestation of his pro-independence agenda.

Nico Perrino: The press release is the Declaration –

Richard Bell: The press release is the Declaration of Independence. News flash, listeners, the Declaration is a press release. That's very exciting. I'm not sold yet, because TP could stand for anything. And the ink that was used to make it may have been from a later period. And even if they want to show it to Thomas Paine, it doesn't mean that he had a hand in writing that draft. It just means they wanted to show him their draft after the fact. We don't see –

Nico Perrino: Was he in Philadelphia at the time?

Richard Bell: No, no, no. He's on the road somewhere. He's on the road somewhere. We don't see his fingerprints on the on the Declaration. All we can say is that that vote on July 2, which brings forth that press release on July 4, that is the combination of the agenda Paine set forth in "Common Sense." And in "Common Sense," he said, "To win this war, to achieve independence, we are gonna need help, and to get help, we need to announce the sincerity of our ambitions for independence to the whole world. And so, we should write down our aspirations for independence in a manifesto."

That's the word he used, not press release. "Manifesto, that we can then share with the courts of Europe." And that's exactly what the drafting committee was trying to do when they drafted that press release. And then it'll be up to Ben Franklin and other delegates who go to Europe soon afterwards to try to get the courts of Europe to pay attention to that manifesto for independence. Paine spirit undergirds the Declaration, even if his fingerprints aren't on the document.

Nico Perrino: He informally commissioned it, we can say.

Richard Bell: Informally. That's right. Informally.

Nico Perrino: All right, Professor, that's been riveting. I learned a lot from the conversation. Before we sign off, though, tell me briefly about this book, "The American Revolution and the Fate of the World." You say it's more of a global look at the Revolution.

Richard Bell: Yeah, that's right. Brand new book out from Penguin. It's a sweeping global history of the American Revolutionary War. It reminds us of all the things we've forgotten, that there were global actors swept into this conflict from the very beginning. Think of French officers like Lafayette or Prussian officers like Stueben. Think about all the Hessian soldiers from the German states who end up on the king's side. Think about all the indigenous warriors. Think about African-descended people. And then it's also about how this war in the 13 colonies spills out of those 13 colonies and spreads around the world.

There's fighting in the Caribbean, in India. It's kicked off by the Chinese tea at the Boston Tea Party. It's a global history of the American Revolution, sort of told from the bottom up with as many interesting and unfamiliar characters as possible. Should be a nice compliment to the familiar Red Coats versus Rebels stuff we hear all the time.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, and I'm not familiar with that whole global story. I know Ken Burns has talked a little bit about it –

Richard Bell: A little bit.

Nico Perrino: – with his new documentary and in some of the speaking tour that he's done surrounding it, but I'd encourage folks to check it out. Again, it's just out, "The American Revolution and the Fate of the World." Professor Bell, thanks for coming on the show.

Richard Bell: Thanks very much.

Nico Perrino: This conversation is part of our series, "Marking America's 250th Anniversary," where we're looking at how expression helped shape the nation, how it's been challenged ever since, and why stories like Thomas Paine's still matter today. I am Nico Perino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIREcolleagues, including Bruce Jones, Ronald Baez, Jackson Fleagle, and Scott Rogers. This podcast is produced by Emily Beamen.

To learn more about "So to Speak," you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or Substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. And you can follow us on X by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk. Feedback can be sent to sotospeak@thefire.org. Again, that is sotospeak@thefire.org. And please, if you enjoy this conversation, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Those help us attract new listeners to the show.

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Duration: 90 minutes