I'm Tony Dean. And today we'll be calling history to speak with Thomas Paine. He'll be answering our call in 1802 at the age of 65 on his way back to the United States after nearly losing his head during the French revolution. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a pamphlet called common sense. Arguing for American independence at the time many Americans were for this drastic change, but many were also against it.
Common sense was read by nearly every American citizen at the time selling more than 500,000 copies, the extraordinary popularity of this pamphlet and the fact that it was written in the common tongue without fancy language as Payne would say, gave the American cause one United voice. During the revolutionary war, George Washington needed a way to motivate the soldiers that were tired and wanted to go home. What did he do?
He read another pamphlet to the men by Thomas Paine called the American crisis that inspired the troops to keep fighting and fight. They did. After the American revolution, the French decided they wanted to have their own revolution. Somehow Thomas Paine ended up in France writing yet another pamphlet to bring those revolutionaries together. It's hard to say exactly what it is about his writings that motivate people to work together, risk their lives and fight for freedom.
But that's exactly what his simple, plain spoken writings did throughout his entire life. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow history, lovers, and shapers of portly gentlemen, everywhere. I give you Thomas Paine. Hello, is that you, Mr. Payne? . It is, sir. Sir, I am so excited to speak with you. My name is Tony Dean, and I'm talking to you from the future, in the 21st century. The device that you're holding is called a smartphone.
It allows us to speak as if and I were sitting in the same room with one another. And it also allows me to share a record of our conversation with people around the world and Mr. Payne, you have lived this unbelievable life and I was just hoping that I could ask you some questions about it. But before I do, I understand this is a strange introduction. Can I answer any questions you might have first?
Well, I am mystified by what you've just said of I've never talked with anybody from a different time. I'm guessing that you wouldn't be surprised to hear that every person that I speak to says that exact same thing. And nonetheless, it is, it's such a wonderful time that I live in that, that this is possible.
And I have to tell you, sir, as I look at your history, the one thing that, , I've always known about you, but didn't understand really the relevance of it, was this pamphlet that you wrote during the American Revolution called Common Sense. And I guess I would just like to hear, like, how that came about, because,, I always thought Common Sense was this pamphlet, you know, and it was interesting and got people fired up. But , my understanding is that like, every in the Americas read this?
This really was the voice that gave them the belief that maybe they deserved freedom and maybe they should go after it. Maybe they deserved rights. , how did this come about? What made you think I need to write this and give all these people a voice? fairly complicated how it came about. You know, I, you know, Arrived in America from England on a ship. I was very sick. I managed to throw off my sickness and I got a job working with a printer.
And in fact he had me become the editor of a a newspaper that he , printed , and. He made me the editor, because he really, he was a printer, not a writer. So, I became engaged with that, and that's how other people started to get to know me. And I wrote , some articles in the paper about, for example, about rights for women. Which, because of the power of , my mother in my life, and I wrote a an article in the paper calling for the possibility of women voting.
And you may be surprised to know some of the colonies allowed women to vote, but only some of them. I didn't know that. Some of the colonies allowed women to vote? That's right, and however once the Constitution came into play, , those sorts of things, those differences between and among the colonies began to disappear. , probably the most dramatic of that sort of thing that happened was the whole issue of slavery.
But for, in terms of women, some women in fact had the ability to vote and , that , became moot once the constitution was in place. And who were made up the Continental Congress could not bring themselves to do two things. One was. to address the issue of slavery, and the other was to address the rights of women.
I should add that one of the things that propelled me , in considering all that, and that I'm much more aware of now, is , years later I met, Mary Wollstonecraft, and she wrote a pamphlet title to my. rights of man pamphlet, he wrote a pamphlet called the rights of women. And one of those things that she was very insistent on is that women should be able to vote.
I'm not surprised to hear, , you're already talking about slavery, and you're already talking about the rights of women, and women voting and it, this seems like the cause of your life. , it seems to me that you were unhappy with the monarchy in England, and then when you got involved with the, Then when you were involved with the French Revolution it sounds like you were a strong proponent of the French Revolution. , your whole life is about fighting for other people's rights.
Where does that come from? I suppose it comes to a certain degree from the fact that my mother, was an Anglican. , my father He was one of the people called Quakers, and he felt very strongly that the testimonies of the people called Quakers were the right way for human beings to live. And so that, that was a big part of my life. , I had to be apprenticed to my father because in school I was unable to learn Latin.
And in order for me to have a position of some importance in society, I needed to be able to learn Latin. And I just couldn't. I can handle the English language but, I've discovered that I'm not very good at learning other languages and Latin was one of them. Well, you'll be glad to know that Latin isn't really popular in our time. In fact, nobody speaks Latin. So maybe it's just too hard for people to learn because they gave up on it in our time.
Well, I don't know about your time in that regard, but I do know that there are many of us in my time who may be able to say a phrase or two in Latin but if someone hands us a piece of writing written in Latin, we can't figure out a thing. I find very distracting, quite frankly, because I learned English , with all the punctuation marks and all that, which I actually quite enjoy doing the punctuation marks. In Latin, you don't have any of those things.
You write some words, and you stop, and then you write some more words. And there's no point of change from one phrase to another. Or one sentence, if you will, to another. Which I find very strange. Yeah, I find that very strange too. So, when you're reading it, is it harder to determine what the writer is saying? Because you don't know where he was stopping to take a breath I suppose, don't ask me. I couldn't make head or tail of it.
And finally my schoolmaster reported to my parents that I did fairly well in things like science and all right in mathematics, but . Forget about Latin. Because my parents allowed to have me in the school because of the, fellow, Lord Grafton, who was, of course, in much higher status than my father.
But he saw that I had Some skills and he wanted to reward me and my father who was the one who made stays for him, as you probably know, men in my time, fancy people would men would wear days or corsets as it's sometimes called. , that was my father's trade. And that's what I learned how to do. Once I was taken out of the school and. APRENTICE TO MY FATHER TO LEARN HOW TO MAKE CORSETS!
YOU'RE TALKING CORSETS FOR WOMEN, YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT THOSE, THINGS THEY PUT AROUND THEIR WAISTS TO MAKE THEIR WAIST LOOK SMALL, RIGHT? WELL , IT'S NOT JUST THAT , IT'S MORE LIKELY FOR WOMEN TO WANT TO HAVE THE FAMOUS WASP WAIST, THAT, THAT WOMEN HAVE not necessarily naturally but because they're cinched in. Lord Grafton became heavier and heavier through my childhood. And so my father had to make.
larger and larger corsets so that he could have enough ability to pinch the man in so he wouldn't look quite so portly. But he still looked portly. that these were for men as well. Do a lot of men wear them in your time? People who were fancy people. Yes. And Lord Grafton was definitely that. Are you a fancy person? Me? No. Not at all. In fact, you may have heard of Gouverneur Morris.
And Gouverneur Morris was really quite one of the reasons I stayed in prison so long in France was because he wasn't interested in helping me get out of prison, he just was happy to have me out of the way. But one of the things he said about me in my life is that I didn't even speak the King's English. , I have a rough hewn language, you might say. Maybe that's why people liked your writing so much. Well, I don't know.
I write what I think is true and argue points that I think are germane to the situation. And I don't try to be fancy in my writing. , I try to speak the truth as I can. Or, in this case, write the truth as I can. My experience being in, if you will, debates was when we were all in taverns and we were having a pint or whatever and , we were arguing about some aspect of our lives, for example, we were arguing about whether people of higher status deserve to have better things in life.
Then people , of modest status, and that was a big concern that people had and I agreed that it just because . Your language is perhaps a little rough, or you don't have all the fancy words, or you can't throw in sentences in Latin to show off that you really know what you're talking about.
Although I never saw that as a blessing , sometimes it's been a very difficult place for me to be, especially when I'm in the presence of people like General Washington and Thomas Jefferson, , men who were, if not as highly educated as each other, they were groomed to be, if you will, gentlemen, instead of just men. So you feel like you fit in the tavern crowd more than you did the Washington Jefferson crowd.
Indeed. And I always was very, , on the one hand amused and on the other hand found it a kind of a blessing when people of, as we would say, of a higher class would take an interest in me and would actually take me seriously. And as you probably know, Common Sense was originally gonna be written by one of the other fellows who was supportive of independency.
The person was Dr. Benjamin Rush, but he had already written some articles for the paper, , about topics that were so strong in their opinion that he lost some of his business, his patience. They stopped coming to him because they thought he was too radical. And so he was a little shy about writing something like Common Sense that he feared might lose him even more. Of his patients. Let's pause for a minute right there.
I wanna ask you specifically about common sense, because , when you say that, , one of the other fellows were gonna write this, I don't think that just anybody can write this. I think that this had to be written by you. , my understanding is that there were. 500,000 of these published and that every person in the colonies are, almost everybody read this. , that's not the easiest thing to do, to get like every single person in your state or country, whatever, to read what you've written.
And you did that my question is this. What were you trying to accomplish with Common Sense? , what is the message that you're trying to get across? , for somebody that, in our time, that, , maybe hadn't read it. What are you trying to say? What are you trying to do? Well, a number of different things. The most important is the pushing for independency. Was right and rightly ordered and that we should not shy away from blaming our, if you will, birthright and becoming an independent nation.
And it was urgent. It seemed to us, to me, and, but also to the others who were the Philadelphia radicals, as we were called sometimes, it was urgent. For us to encourage the average people to take a position on this and to actively push for independency. Because a great many of the people who had particular standing in society were going to lose a great deal. And , because they might lose a great deal, they were very hesitant, if you will.
Take a position of freedom and independency and breaking off from the crown and all of that, and setting up a government that was very different from what Great Britain had been claiming for itself for centuries. Not to put too big a, an importance on that because it's as we know the chain of, Kings and so on through time was not exactly continuous and healthy.
It often was broken apart and people took very different positions and you have the James's, for example when it came time for James the brother of Charles the second, to become king, it was a panic for the English because he was a Catholic and the English did not want to have another Catholic. So they had to hunt around who can we find to be the king because we need a king. And they finally hit upon William, who , he was a Protestant, but he wasn't even English. He was Dutch.
It's amazing that they think that they can just plug people into there, like the king isn't an important job. They don't even have to consider merit. They can just grab some guy and they're like, oh good, he's not a Catholic, we're good. We'll just throw Joe in there and he's our guy. That's right. And it's amazing how much that has taken over people's idea about what makes for good government. It's one thing if you have, let's say a blacksmith or something who is amazing in his skill.
It's possible for that blacksmith To teach his son, perhaps, to become as good a blacksmith as he, but you have to be trained in that way.
It's very much harder and because it's so much of a manual thing it's not highly intellectual, whereas with kings and so on, you have to have some kind of sense of the world and it's not going to work if it always has to be the son of the king, it is dangerous , to change, and that's why kings are so eager to have a son witness Henry VIII, who went through quite a number of wives until finally he got a son. And that son didn't last very long and died, I believe when he was about 15 years old.
So is this part of the message that you're trying to get across to everybody that maybe the person who has the most important job in the country maybe isn't always a descendant and that is going to lead to problems later. Is that the message of common sense? Well, Yes, in a sense that the message is we the people, if you will, need to make choices ourselves about who we want to be.
The, If you will, the head of state, not a king, but someone who has talents and skills various kinds of abilities that allow. For clear thinking and clear decision making, and of course it helps to have other people around, which is why you have , , according to the constitution, you've got the president, and then you've got, not just one, but two congresses and it's very important to have people around.
People of skill and talent and to a certain extent stature but you don't have to all be of the same background in order to have skill and stature. , when you talk about you were telling the story just a second ago using that comparison of the blacksmith. If you were to imagine this blacksmith, you think of a blacksmith, you think of a guy, kind of a strong, burly guy, with big arms, swinging that big hammer, and the fire, and the heat, and the soot on his face.
If you were to have a kid, And that kid weighed 75 pounds and could barely lift the hammer up. Just because you have the kid, he's not the guy to throw into the blacksmith position. Well, you're going to have that kid. You know what I mean? And that kid is an intellectual. He doesn't need to be swinging a hammer. And yet that's exactly what they did in the monarchy. It didn't matter what the next kid with doesn't matter how smart he was or how talented he was.
It's just like, okay, you're the king. Cause you're the son. A lot of those guys couldn't swing a hammer, which is why that was, The problem and I'm speaking metaphorically. Okay, but I see what you're saying. It makes it really makes a lot of sense. It's absurd. So tell me this. What were you hoping to accomplish when common sense came out? Were you trying to cause riots? Were you trying to actually change the government? Were you looking for violence? Non violence? What was your goal?
Well, often when governments change as you know, there is a certain amount of turmoil. Now the beauty of the constitution is that it allowed for certain things to happen that were not likely to produce violence and so on. So long as everybody was in agreement that the process had worked properly. And that's where we sometimes get into trouble when one person claims to have won, but it's not a real win.
That's why it's important for as many people as possible to be able to have a vote, a choice, as to what they want. Yeah, that makes sense. Give people a voice so that we can actually vote instead of just hand power to somebody. So, , now common sense And did you make a lot of money from, 500, 000 copies being sold? , well, it wasn't really me who did all of that.
And one of the reasons for that was that the first printing that happened in Philadelphia with an agreement between the printer whose name was Robert Bell, And myself we agreed that any copies that sold, he would be able to hold on to 50 percent and I would get 50%. Now Now once the sales started, it became fairly clear that people were eager to read this pamphlet.
They had heard about it, people had maybe discussed it some Common Sense is really a fairly large pamphlet, we call it a pamphlet, , depending on who's been printing it it's at least 44 pages. Now, some people printed it with very fine type, and some people did it larger , and the reason for that was there was no way that Robert Bell could hundreds of thousands of copies or even hundreds of copies over and over again. The first run was, I believe, about 2000, and those sold out fairly quickly.
They also, Got mailed around and so people like, Franklin, for example, , who knew people elsewhere and new printers elsewhere. He was able to send a copy and then a printer in, say, Charleston or , in New York would take that and reset the type for that addition most of them were fairly consistent in what the wording was, not every one of them but most of them , didn't try to change what the document was.
However, they sometimes were on cruder paper and larger typeface and that sort of thing. But most of the copies were not printed anywhere near Philadelphia. Charleston was a big place where printing happened. And New York and Boston. Lots of, lots of other places were printing basically the same document over and over again. But you weren't getting paid on it, right?
, we had a struggle Robert Bell and I, and once he saw that it was gonna be profitable, he started to say, well, actually, I had to spend a lot more money than I thought on getting the paper originally, and he basically was trying to steal from me, and it was hard for me to push back against him on what amount I was gonna get. However, I had already promised myself and promised others that.
Anything I was paid for the printing that, especially that first printing in January of 1776 that, those funds would go to buy mittens for the Continental Army. Is that right? You agreed that the proceeds from the sale of that would go to help the Army? That's right, because it was winter and the Army was already in the field. Well, well before the Continental Congress that worked on the Constitution.
So after this is published and everybody is reading this and they're developing their voice for We Need Freedom, how does your life change? Do you become popular? , do people know who you are everywhere you go? No, not necessarily. The first few printings of the pamphlet did not have my name on it at all. I refer to myself as the author in the introduction. And did not put a name on it. Now, a lot of people fairly quickly, especially in Philadelphia, knew that I was the author.
But it was not necessarily well known although once people started reprinting not in pamphlet form, but , in newspaper form, as it was fairly often reprinted that way my name began to appear in some way indicating that I had written it. Now, a lot of people didn't know my name. So, , it was not necessarily something that made me famous, everybody reads it. And so few people know where it came from. . , so now let me.
Go a little bit into the future, ? , you now are involved with , the way I see it, giving people a voice for the revolution, and then there is another document, or pamphlet that you print called the American Crisis, and it is my understanding that, This, that, I think this is the one that Washington read to the troops to keep the troops inspired. And the American crisis, I think, is the one that starts with, These are the times that try men's souls.
That's just the first of, I believe it was 16 different pamphlets, and that was just the first one. And you're right, it was very important at that moment, and Washington actually asked me if I would write it, because he was afraid because of , it being winter and men being cold and they wanted to see their families again and that sort of thing, he was afraid that, especially after the success at Trenton, he was afraid that they would say, Oh, I'm tired.
I'm going to go home and some did, but he really wanted them to stay. And so this was a way of trying to encourage them not to give up at that point, but to keep going. So that is true. Washington read it to the troops. And of course, we now know, well, I don't know that he read it, but he had it read. Yes, he had it read. Okay. And so this is why I'm so amazed by your story. So here we've got the American Revolution, , kind of, simmering, right? Not quite boiling over.
, we got the Stamp Act in 64, we got the Townsend Act in 67, , people are writing things, people are speaking. And then common sense comes out, and common sense comes out and unites the people's voice until the point where they're fighting. And then when they're fighting, next thing you know, the troops need a voice. They need some sort of unity. And then you become the voice of that.
And I just, I find that miraculous , can you even imagine if you hadn't written common sense and you hadn't written the American crisis, I mean, what do you think would have happened to the army if you, if they had not had the American crisis to unite them? What do you think? Well, , don't know how many of the soldiers in the army actually read that. They did have it read to them before crossing the Delaware to attack the Hessians in Trenton. But I suppose it had some good effect on them.
I was not present. I was in Philadelphia. And which is where I wrote it and the pamphlet and sent it on to Washington. But yes, you're right. It's not enough to, Have one pamphlet, say common sense, and stop there. You have to keep, adding fuel to the fire, so to speak.
That is interesting that you say it that way, because , it does appear that as you go through your life, when these different fires needed to be fueled, you were the guy carrying the logs , which would make me want to ask you about the French revolution, because then you got involved in that.
But. Hold on, I don't want to go quite to that yet, because I feel like you're being a little humble right now, because when I read the first part of the American Crisis, and the one where it starts where it says these times will try men's souls, And it talks about tyranny is hell, not easily conquered, and yet, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. When I get done reading just the opening to this, I'm looking for somebody to fight. I'm looking for a cause.
I mean, I would be inspired if I was a soldier. And, I just think that, I can't imagine that not existing. It's incredible to me. , So now we got the French revolution. So now the French revolution needs somebody to write and get behind that. So then you wrote something on that, didn't you? Well, I wrote a number of things while I was in France. , the first important thing that I wrote in France was the rights of man.
And the whole point of that was to say to the French,, the Americans were separating themselves from a monarchy. But it wasn't quite the same as the French, who were basically overthrowing the XVI was right there and in France.
And they were able to capture him and to basically begin the process of dealing with , an oppressive system, which involved not only the monarchy, but it involved the church in France, which was not the case really in America, as you know, there were each of the colonies either had A strong base , in some form of religion, since people seem to feel a need for religion perhaps the least strong over time was Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania was started, , by Quakers
and they, among other things, refused for very many years to set up a militia. And the militia was there to defend the colony so that there'd be some kind of violence, and avoiding having a militia sometimes got very scary to Pennsylvanians because they were out in the frontier and they were being attacked by the French and the Native peoples because of what the French and the Native people saw as English invading Which is not quite the way the colonists tended to see it.
So, now it is time for you to get involved with the the French. And you went to France. And what was the reception that you got there? When you start the rights of man and that gets published, what is the response? I understand, you did some jail time. Did they put you in jail right away? No, no it's, actually fairly complicated, all this business about my going to France. And I wasn't just going to France initially.
What I was doing in 1787 was I had developed a Design for a single span bridge that could be built across the school to the river. To the west of Philadelphia, that would allow for people to transport goods without having to Put them on a ferry , the Schuylkill was a very, and swift river. And it, especially in seasons of storms and snow and ice it became very dangerous to try to transport things across the river.
So having a bridge Would make it much easier for the goods from Philadelphia that were manufactured, , in Philadelphia to be transported to the West and for crops and things like that from the West to come to Philadelphia without having to take your life in your hand every time you wanted to load stuff onto a ferry going across. So my vision was to have this bridge. I turned to Franklin because Franklin has some good sense about this sort of thing.
And he urged me to go to Europe, to go to England and to France and talk with the Royal Society and the French society who dealt with such things and to get their approval because the Pennsylvania Assembly. Was unwilling to provide any funds for this bridge. I thought it was too expensive.
And I did my best to try to convince them that an iron bridge going across the river would last a good, bit longer than either a stone bridge or a wooden bridge, both of which would take a beating, especially in the harsh weather. So then what happened? Well, what happened was, various things started happening in France, and I got distracted from my bridge, if you will. I didn't have much luck promoting my bridge.
Sometime later, a fella actually took my plan and had it built across the Severn River in England. Of course they did. But I had nothing to do with that. Yeah, I mean they basically, you write something, they print it wherever they want and don't pay you for it. You make a bridge, they're like no thanks, and then later on they copy your bridge as well. From the way of the world.
Well, I it appears from a distance here that people that are trying to make things and accomplish things are very thankful for all your ideas, even though they don't wanna pay you for them. IUP suppose I suppose that's true. I mean, I did get some compensation for all my efforts but it.
It wasn't necessarily in a timely way, so there were times when I was walking around with nothing in my pockets to speak of and had to rely on the the courtesy of my friends who would treat me to a pint and a pot of stew. Well that's how you know who your friends are when they'll treat you to a pint when you're down, that's for sure.
me this, a lot of times when people, have a cause that they feel as passionately about as you do, it appears to me that those people aren't so concerned about making money and that's part of the reason why, , maybe contracts aren't handled properly. It's because it's just not your, first goal. , is making money from what you're writing your number one goal or is the cause the number one goal? I never, it never even occurred to me, really, by writing, I could actually make money.
My understanding of making money was, well, if you were a privateer, you'd go out and you'd stop let's say, friendships during The Seven Years War, for example, and you'd seize the goods on the ship, and then you'd be able to sell them when you got back to port. And everyone on the ship would get a share of that. In fact, that was the only time that I really had money in my pockets is after I served as a cabin boy on board a ship called the Terrible.
Actually, no, I didn't go on the Terrible first. My father found out that I was about to enlist on the Terrible. And he came, and he forced me to come back with him to Thetford, where we lived in in north of London. But he couldn't stop me completely, and I was able to go back and reenlist on a ship that was called the King of Prussia.
And the King of Prussia turned out to be very lucrative for the owner of the ship and for all of the crew, including people like me who were at the bottom of the barrel. But I got paid fairly well for the months that I was on the ship and helping to do the work of the ship. So are you a pirate? Privateer? Is the word , is that what pirates say when they're doing it legally? ? No, it's a privateer. The big difference between a pirate and a prier is that a privateer.
Is working for a government, , and it usually happens in times of conflict and war and so on, and the privateers are given license by the government to go out and capture the ships of the enemy and to seize goods and to bring those goods back to the country that's hired them. In the name of the war? Well, usually in the name of the king , oh, okay. Okay. I see. The British privateers were not the actual Navy, but An adjunct, , to the navy itself.
And the goal was not to destroy the other ship. You, if you were lucky, you managed to not only seize the goods on the ship, but you might even be able to seize the ship itself and bring it back and turn it over to , whoever was in charge of that, . depends on what their your system is, but if it's the king, then it's the king. I never had so much money in my pocket as when I was 19, 20, 21 years old, having sailed on the King of Prussia and had a lot of money jingling in my pockets.
it seems like you had a lot of jobs throughout your life, and I don't see any connection between any of them. I mean, you're a privateer, you're a writer, you're making corsets for portly men didn't you work in tobacco at some point? Well, that was just when I was, that was just when I was a youngster. Actually, later on, when I was having trouble in England, I tried to take up making stays again, and it was a disaster. I was in the wrong place.
The nice thing about the place where my father lived in Thetford, was he was the only clay maker. So that if someone wanted a set of stays to be made, they went to him. Whereas if you were in London, there was a lot of competition. And stays are what we would call, I think we call them corsets in our time. I don't know. That's what they are. It's the things you put around your waist. . Yes. Both men and women wear them. They do slightly different things for men and women.
Men just don't want to look partly and unfit. So if you try to pull yourself in a bit, then you look like a burly man and not a fat man. Got it. Will you be doing anything else over the next couple of years? Are you going to be building houses or ships or anything? Well, I do have some ideas about ships because of my experience sailing aboard the King of Prussia, but I've never been able to think about that as a part of a trade. I seem to be caught up in the writing business.
And I don't mind that. I've written quite a number of pamphlets and some of them are large enough you might even call them books, and more recently I've been writing to important people. I consider important people trying to argue certain things , for example, one of the. Things that I've tried to do is to try to encourage people of some status in society to really think clearly about who should be involved in, the running of a government, should it only be the fancy people?
Mostly the continental Congress was relatively well to do people. Not people a lower status in society. Do you think that there should be more of the lower citizens in government? Should there be street sweepers and horse cleaners and, , people that are not as educated? Should they be in those positions? Absolutely.
. You don't have to be highly trained for many jobs, you just need to have an ability to learn how to do things, and then to do them, and it doesn't hurt if the powers that be decide that your work is worth paying for. Unfortunately, if you're at the bottom of the barrel, you're less likely to have a strong argument for saying, , why don't you pay me more
? had to push with Robert Bell to try to get as much money as I could, but , in effect, he held the purse strings because he was a printer and he got the money. The money for the printing of the pamphlets. And then he had to share it with me. , which he didn't sound like he did a very good job doing. He, no he didn't.
And I was especially distressed because as I said earlier spent enough time out in the field with the Continental Army that I knew that if it was winter time One of the things you need to have, if you're a soldier, you need to have a way of keeping your hands warm, because how are you going to fight if your hands are frozen? So mittens seem to be the right thing for me to pay for. I did my best.
, I feel like we got sidetracked a little bit , I don't feel like I heard , how do you almost get executed in being in prison in France? So you went over to build the bridge and, yeah, what am I missing? So, well, here's what happened., my mission , to build the bridge turned out to be. A failure and then the French of their own accord, it had nothing to do with me. They were very happy to begin a process that they themselves had already started.
I didn't start it , to throw over Louis the 16th and have something more like was happening in America. They were inspired by what had happened in America. That was what the rights of man was about. It was arguing that, yes, human beings should be able to be responsible for their own decision making and their own decision about what sort of government do we want and that sort of thing. Um, the problem for me with the French was twofold, at least.
One is, just as I'd had no success in learning Latin, I had very little success learning any French., and the French decided that they were, admired me enough because of common sense, that they wanted me to be part of their new government now that I had I imprisoned, I XVI and Marie Antoinette, and then ultimately they were executed, but within the group of revolutionaries, there were really several factions and they didn't get along very well And
ultimately, , I was imprisoned because One side decided that I was favoring the other side, and that I was a danger to their revolution, and so I was jailed. In a pretty fearsome prison. It wasn't really a prison, but it was a place you could easily lock somebody in and keep them there for a long time. I was in the prison for 10 months. And let me tell you, you don't want to be in prison for 10 minutes, much less 10 months, because nobody , pays much attention.
The only person who paid me much mind was one of the guards who was stationed outside my door who spoke a little English. So he and I could communicate and we did. We had some very interesting discussions. And he didn't help me get out or anything, but was friendly enough that I felt sort of secure. Um, and He felt secure enough that he was not afraid, partly because I got quite sick. , he was not afraid that I would try to escape.
And so I would sit in my cell, he would open the door my cell so we could talk with each other without having to shout through the door. And we'd have some interesting conversations in as much as we could both speak English together. And at one point They decided that it was time for me to be executed, so , that part of the operation they came through the prison, putting big X marks on the doors as they went by.
Well, the door to my cell was pushed back against the wall because it was open because , the guard and I were having a conversation. And when the, um, came around to mark my door as being someone who would be executed the next day, they marked the door. But then when he closed the door at the end of our conversation, the mark was on the inside and not visible from the hallway. So they passed me up. And I was not executed. I don't really believe in miracles, but it felt a little like that.
, just because the door had been opened, that I was spared having my head severed. Not only was Thomas Paine, an extraordinary writer, able to motivate people to fight for the cause of freedom. But apparently after listening to the story about the X on the inside of the door, he was also very lucky. In the next episode, he's going to talk about how some of his religious beliefs got him in trouble, his dealings with the Polian and the impact of some of his other writings.
I'm glad you're enjoying this podcast. If you haven't yet subscribed now. And we'll see you at the next episode of the calling history of podcasts with part two of Thomas Payne.