h perseverance and necessity. His financial woes are the stuff on which young loan sharks are weaned. He grew up the soon of a poor corset maker, and knew only poverty most of his life. His employment track is littered with miss-starts in many fields, including stints as a teacher, a seaman, a tobacco shop owner and at various times a excise man. None of these were to be successful positions for Paine, giving him the start of a grudge towards England and its economy. After surviving one wife and separating from another, Paine was near his perceived end. Yet on the recommendation of a new acquaintance from America he decided to head west to the colonies, in hope of escaping the misery he’d endured in England. With nothing to his name but letters of recommendation (from the American whom he’d met in London), he arrived in Philadelphia, America in 1774. This American happened to be none other then Benjamin Franklin, and the prominence of Paines’ recommender gained him the position of editor of the newly founded Pennsylvanian Magazine. Here, Paine established himself as a radical thinker, a person unafraid to enter into the independence furor. Remembering the hardships he had faced in England, Paine became he ideal American patriot. In 1776 Paine published the Common Sense pamphlet without signing his name to it. Demanding independence from England and the establishment of a strong American union, the pamphlet found overwhelming support and approval with American colonists. With the revelation of its’ author the pamphlet continued its’ wave of success, drawing commendation from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In one of the most perfectly timed releases in history, Common Sense was unleashed to a public hungry for direction, and touched upon a raw nerve the size of a revolution. Paine quickly followed up in December of that year with the first in a series of pamphlets entitled The Crisis. It began, ̶...
