0;These are the times that try men’s souls...Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” These lines were read aloud to Washington’s’ men as they lay shivering in the winter cold. From that point on Paine looked to figure prominently in the American revolution. Thomas Paine served in the army as a solider, and froze along side the rest of America’s patriots during the winters of 1776 and 1777. In 1777 he received appointment to the position of Secretary to the Congressional Committee of Foreign Affairs. His luck had changed since his arrival in 1776, yet his personality was to be his eventual downfall. By openly and honestly exposing corruption within his departments ranks, he earned himself the first in a long line of enemies. Paine was forced to resign his position, and found himself in the situation of surviving off charity. With subsequent appointments he gave away much of his money to the revolutionary cause, and preferred to focus on continuing his Crisis pamphlets. Several years after the end of the Revolutionary War, Paine was given approximately $2500. by the state of Pennsylvania, a house and farm near New Rochelle by New York and was voted the amount of $3000. by congress. Regardless of his newly acquired wealth, Paine found ways to disrupt his own life, first by going to France in support of it’s revolution, and then finding himself an outlaw in England after he had published his two part Rights of Man there in 1791 and 1792. On August 26, 1972, Thomas Paine became a French citizen, and quickly positioned himself in the limelight surrounding France’s Revolution. He won wide support, and gained a seat in the National Convention. Once again, Paines’ brutal honesty earned him enemies when he criticized the amount of bloodshed France’s Revolution was seeing. Once again he lost his power, being quickly stripped of his seat, his citizenship, and any immunity; and finding hims...
