His mother belonged to the established Church of England, but he was reared with the Quaker convictions of his father’s family.3 Influence is always an elusive force in a person’s life, but there seems little doubt that the Society of Friends’ recent proscription of slavery readied him to become slavery’s ardent opponent in America. One in six Philadelphia households contained at least one slave. Franklin owned four of the city’s some 1,500 slaves.4 Within a year Paine joined the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society and wrote “African Slavery in America” (1775) which appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser, excoriating those who participated in the “savage practice ... contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy” (p. 5 ). Always quick to get to the point, Paine may have been the first person publicly to advocate emancipation. In his journal article, he was particularly effective in dismissing claims of biblical support for slavery. After becoming the new editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, he wrote about the treatment of Indians and women. All the arguments over rights and abuses he had been carrying on for two decades now became the subjects of essays. A man with many arrows in his quiver, Paine also composed humorous verses, scientific treatises, and a ballad for the journal. In a matter of months he had honed his straightforward, lucid, and cogent prose. The epigrams, metaphors, and barbs that peppered his essays seem to have come naturally.

Paine’s first publication, a plea to Parliament for salary raises for the underpaid excise men—The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772)—only got him sacked, but “African Slavery in America” led in five years to an invitation to compose the preamble to an act providing for the gradual abolition of slavery. In 1780 Pennsylvania passed a landmark piece of legislation, the world’s first abolition law, and Paine had the satisfaction of reading it aloud to the Pennsylvania Assembly in his capacity as clerk. Other northern states followed suit, and by 1801 slavery had been put on the course toward extinction in that part of America. The Mason-Dixon Line, the boundary that a team of surveyors laid between Pennsylvania and Maryland, now demarked something even more portentous: the division between free and slave labor in the United States.

Paine’s reputation over the course of two centuries has stressed the impact of Common Sense on America. Less attention has been paid to how colonial society affected Paine. Exhilarated by the absence of noblemen whose conspicuous opulence and haughty manners vivified for him the unjust hierarchies in England, Paine felt immediately at home in America. The wealthy in Philadelphia were but pale imitations of the English aristocracy. Indeed he became the friend of many of them. Here no group had a monopoly of places of honor and power, as Franklin’s career had demonstrated. Paine loved the free exchanges in daily life, the easy mingling of men and women on the city’s streets. He even found a different kind of cosmopolitanism to boast about in this provincial outpost: the integration of diverse ethnic groups in Pennsylvania. An inadvertent tolerance had sprung up that showed that people might live in peace despite the enmities fostered by patriotic bombast and religious zeal. Americans were cosmopolitan because they had surmounted local prejudices. They regarded people from different nations as their countrymen and ignored neighborhoods, towns, and counties, he noted, as “distinctions too limited for Continental minds” (p. 34). And of course Paine’s success in finding a position of responsibility and an outlet for his writings could only have enhanced his enthusiasm for his new country.

No more propitious moment for a Thomas Paine to arrive in British North America could be imagined than the end of 1774. The colonies had been resisting the British government’s new measures for regulating its empire for more than eight years. They had opposed new taxes and changes in admiralty law, as well as new restrictions on their trade. They had recoiled at invasions of their legislative prerogatives, but all to no avail.