More than 150,000 copies of Common Sense sold within a year at a time when the number of readers in the colonies could not have exceeded 700,000. Editions quickly appeared in London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Copenhagen.7 Those who were illiterate could listen to Paine’s rhetoric read aloud to them in private parlors and public gatherings. Soon everyone was quoting such phrases as “the Continental belt is too loosely buckled” (p. 61) or descriptions of William the Conqueror as “a French bastard landing with an armed Banditti” (p. 27). American colonies, Paine wryly commented, will thrive as long as “eating is the custom of Europe” (p. 32). Although Common Sense was published anonymously as “written by an Englishman,” readers quickly identified the author as Paine.

An elixir to the spirits of the pro-independence faction, Common Sense reached a much larger audience than the pamphlets that had been flowing from colonial presses since the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. Paine’s simple syntax was easy to understand, and his exhilarating bravado was contagious. When he referred to George III as “the Royal Brute of Great Britain,” making “a havoc of mankind,” readers could hyperventilate over such a seditious statement (p. 44). Judging from contemporary correspondence and diary entries, Paine was responsible for convincing many colonists that independence was not only the best choice, but one that would put them on the side of the angels. As he was to do many times again, Paine had taken ideas out of gentlemen’s conversations and pushed them into the public arena for all to talk about.

After Congress declared independence in July 1776, Paine enlisted in a Pennsylvania military outfit, serving as aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene. Witness to the disastrous early months of the war, when New York fell and the Continental army fled across New Jersey, Paine took up his pen again to write about the so-called American crisis. Beginning with the famous opening, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” the dozen or so pieces that constitute The American Crisis Papers extended Paine’s commentary from 1776 to 1783, when the Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the United States granted the latter independence. Although Paine’s unflagging service won gratitude and respect from Revolutionary leaders, particularly George Washington, his life began to acquire some of the ragged edges it had had in England. Always in debt, he got by with government stipends and awards, a mark of his carelessness with money as well as a generosity that drained his pocket. Paine gave freely to the causes he believed in, donating all of his earnings at one point to the Continental army. He had argued strongly for an international copyright, but he rarely received any royalties from his works, best-sellers that they were. In the after-math of the war he secured some stipends, and Washington successfully spearheaded an effort to secure a 300-acre estate near New Rochelle, New York, confiscated from a British loyalist, to which Paine would return many years later.

Paine went back to his love of science and mechanics. He designed an innovative 400-foot single-span iron bridge and continued to write in response to postwar issues. Yet Paine was a true revolutionary; peace made him restless. In 1787 he left the United States with a 13-foot model of his bridge, going first to France and then to England, where eventually his bridge was built. Most gratifying to Paine was that his reputation preceded him. He brought back to his birthplace the cachet of both prophet and victor. Many English political figures had reacted with hostility to all things associated with their former colonies, but others had cheered the Americans in their struggle. Edmund Burke, the great Whig leader in Parliament, had judged the Americans right. He cultivated Paine as an expert on the terra incognita of the new United States. Paine did not forget his American friends either. He visited with Thomas Jefferson, who was then serving as minister to France, and corresponded with Washington, Franklin, and Samuel Adams, among others.

As early as 1782 Paine had predicted that the example of the United States would influence the French and English and eventually resonate around the world.