George Washington and Thomas Paine: Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

George Washington was famously taciturn, often a man of few words in public gatherings. And though his published works are sparse in comparison to many of his fellow founders, he nevertheless left a voluminous written record of correspondence and diary entries that is still being parsed today.[1]

It was while commanding the Continental Army that Washington met a man of many words who supported his leadership throughout the Revolutionary War. The writer was anything but shy when it came to publishing his thoughts in support of the American Cause. John Adams acknowledged as much when he reportedly said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”[2]

That author of course was Thomas Paine, a recent English immigrant who arrived on America’s shores in December 1774 (just barely, as Typhoid fever almost took his life during the voyage). His Common Sense is generally acknowledged to be the most popular pamphlet of persuasive writing published during the American Revolutionary period.[3] Initially penned anonymously in January 1776, the timing of its appearance was perfect to bring to a boil the simmering resentment developing in colonial America of British rule and its rising use of force.

Paine secured a position as editor of Robert Aitkens’s new Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum in January 1775, a month after landing in Philadelphia. While an agent in London representing several colonies, Benjamin Franklin had met Paine and provided him with a letter of introduction upon learning Paine was planning a move to America. If nothing else, that letter, when found among the sick arrival’s belongings, helped Paine receive special treatment after landing. Within weeks, he was up and out and about, exploring the city.

Advertisement

At first, Paine published little about the growing conflict with his native country, honoring his publisher’s desires to steer clear of such topics. But the battles at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 startled and angered him. So, Paine began work on a pamphlet in response while also allowing some not-so-subtle anti-British sentiments to slip into Aitkens’s supposedly apolitical magazine. The last two stanzas of his poem Liberty Tree, published in the July 1775 issue, served as a call to arms:

But hear, O ye swains (’tis a tale most profane),
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain
To cut down this guardian of ours.

From the East to the West blow the trumpet to arms,
Thro’ the land let the sound of it flee:
Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,
In defense of our Liberty Tree.[4]

Common Sense struck the right chord with George Washington when he read it in early 1776 while bogged down with his army during the long siege of Boston. The general praised the pamphlet’s “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning” for independence in a letter he wrote to Col. Joseph Reed.^[5] And in a follow-up letter to Reed, Washington continued, “by private Letters which I have lately received from Virginia, I find common sense is working a powerful change there in the Minds of many Men.”[6]

Advertisement

It may have been Gen. Charles Lee who first alerted Washington to the pamphlet: “Have You seen the pamphlet Common Sense? I never saw such a masterly irresistible performance. . . . It will if I mistake not, in concurrence with the transcendent folly and wickedness of the Ministry give the coup de grace to G. Britain. . . . In short I own myself convinced by the arguments of the necessity of separation.”^[7] Although Lee’s support for the war, and especially for Washington’s leadership, would prove duplicitous, the popularity of Paine’s pamphlet meant much to those leading the fight against Great Britain in the months leading up to Independence.

Washington was going to need a little help from his friends, genuine and pretended, to successfully prosecute the war. And Paine stepped up. By late spring of 1776, Common Sense was so wildly successful—having sold many thousands of copies in several editions in just a few weeks—that Paine started using the nom de plume Common Sense for many of his writings.

The pamphlet helped kickstart the movement toward independence in America. But once independence was declared achieved six months after the pamphlet’s appearance, the euphoria that surrounded the Declaration of Independence in July quickly faded after the Continental Army’s defeats in New York and New Jersey in the months that followed. By December 1776, six months after the Declaration of Independence, the war seemed all but over, a period Paine described as very dark. Washington wrote to his brother Samuel Washington that “the game is pretty near up.”[8]

After Independence was declared, Paine had joined the Pennsylvania Associators, a Pennsylvania Flying Camp militia division as secretary to Gen. Daniel Roberdeau and was sent with the soldiers to Perth-Amboy in New Jersey where, according to a rumor, a British invasion force was preparing to land. When the threat did not materialize, the unit ended its duties and went home. Paine instead continued on to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to volunteer with the Continental Army. There he met General Nathanael Greene who appointed him aide-de-camp. And there, Greene introduced Paine to General Washington.[9] A years-long friendship between the two followed. It was not to last.

Although he carried a firearm, Paine’s weapon of choice was a “literary musket.”[10] And for that, he was much admired. While encamped with soldiers at Fort Lee, Paine observed firefights across the Hudson River in New York and began submitting pieces to the Philadelphia press, mostly to the Pennsylvania Journal & Weekly Advertiser. In doing so, Paine became one of America’s first embedded war correspondents.[11]

Soldiers noticed he marched with them and shared their misery during the long, cold and demoralizing retreat from Fort Lee to and across the Delaware River in the late fall. They had barely stayed ahead of the advancing British army. The American soldiers liked receiving a “puff” in Philadelphia’s newspapers as a result of Paine’s writing.[12] But the march across New Jersey took its toll on their spirit. For their part, British soldiers knew about that “scoundrel Common Sense,” knew that he was among the retreating American soldiers.[13]

At night during the retreat Paine developed his idea for the first of a series of what turned out during the war to be thirteen numbered Crisis papers, with a few extra supplementals associated with the series. Once again, he was angry, this time with the downturn of America’s war prospects. Fearing a falloff in American commitment, he composed a pamphlet he called the American Crisis 1, recalling in a letter to Franklin that it “was written in a rage when our affairs were at their lowest ebb and things in the most gloomy state.”[14]

The rousing tract, beginning with the words “These are the times that try men’s souls,” was written to boost the morale of American soldiers and patriots. He also had this to say in a letter to Henry Laurens about writing the piece:

A few days after our army had crossed the Delaware on the 8th of December, 1776, I came to Philadelphia on public service, and seeing the deplorable and melancholy condition the people were in, afraid to speak, and almost to think, the public presses stopped, and nothing in circulation but fears and falsehoods, I sat down, and in what I may call a passion of patriotism wrote the first number of the Crisis. It was published on the 19th of December, which was the very blackest of times, being before the taking of the Hessians at Trenton.[15]

Washington’s daring surprise victory at the Battle of Trenton on the day after Christmas improved the nation’s mood and resolve. Legend has it that Washington ordered Paine’s words from Crisis 1, published in Philadelphia a few days earlier, to be read to his troops prior to crossing the Delaware. Although there is no evidence for the story, it is deeply embedded in the literature of the American Revolution.[16]

But there is no question that Paine’s Crisis 1 was also meant to boost the reputation of the army’s commander-in-chief. Following successes at Trenton and Princeton, Washington’s army continued to suffer more defeats, again raising questions among his subordinate officers and in the Congress about his leadership. So, Paine publicly defended the American leader:

Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him. There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discover a cabinet of fortitude; and I reckon it among those kind of public blessings, which we do not immediately see, that God hath blessed him with uninterrupted health, and given him a mind that can even flourish upon care.[17]

Paine wrote several more Crisis papers in support of Washington over the next few years. After the general achieved his decisive victory at Yorktown in 1781, with a little help from his French friends, Paine no longer needed to defend Washington’s reputation. In his last numbered Crisis publication, the author Common Sense was able to declare that the times that tried men’s souls were over.

For his part, Washington reciprocated by supporting Paine’s efforts to receive some remuneration for his services during the war. Had Paine accepted his due proceeds from all of his highly successful publications in support of the cause for Independence and Revolutionary War, he would have become quite prosperous. Instead, he chose to donate the earnings from his writings to democratic causes, both in America and later on in Europe.

Washington wrote several letters to influential leaders in Congress and the states, seeking their help in rewarding Paine for his contributions: “Can nothing be done in our Assembly for poor Paine?” asked Washington in a letter to close friends in Virginia. “Must the merits and Services of Common Sense continue to glide down the stream of time, unrewarded by this Country?”[18]

In the end, Virginia did nothing, fretting over Paine’s publication of Public Good, a pamphlet written in 1780 advocating national sovereignty over the states’ property claims in a dispute over Virginia’s western boundary.[19] But New York did reward Paine with a confiscated Tory farm in New Rochelle, and Congress and Pennsylvania granted Paine cash rewards for his past services.

None of these gifts made Paine wealthy. But they were sufficient to free him to pursue other things, notably in Europe where he went on the eve of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to promote an iron bridge he had invented and to spend the next decade and a half caught up in more revolutionary activities.[20] (Awaiting the signed Treaty of Paris to arrive, formally ending the war, Washington and Paine found the time toward the end of 1783 to conduct a scientific experiment together on the outskirts of Princeton).[21]

While Paine was in Europe, the relationship between now-President Washington and Paine soured, even though Paine dedicated his first volume of the Rights of Man to his old friend. Later, imprisoned during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Paine became convinced that Washington did nothing to help get him released. Although envoy James Monroe managed to accomplish that, Paine published a bitter public letter, against the advice of Monroe and Franklin, both of whom were also then in France, attacking Washington and his leadership during the Revolutionary War.[22] Washington’s decision to not respond to Paine’s public attack was characteristic.

Paine’s letter, plus his publication while in Europe of The Age of Reason, an attack on organized religion, including Christianity, meant that he was mostly considered persona non grata upon his return to America in 1802. For a while, President Thomas Jefferson entertained Paine and kept corresponding with his old Revolutionary friend, much to the chagrin of the Federalist Party which despised Paine for his letter to Washington.

John Adams, for one, came to dismiss Paine’s originality and Revolutionary era contributions, writing that Paine

came from England, and got into such company as would converse with him, and ran about picking up what Information he could, concerning our Affairs, and finding the great Question was Independence, he gleaned from those he saw common place Arguments concerning Independence: such as the Necessity of Independence … the peculiar fitness at this time; the justice of it; the Provocation to it . . . our Ability to maintain it &c. &c.[23]

Paine scholar J.C.D. Clark echoed Adams’s reappraisal by claiming that though Paine got caught up in them, he did not really understand the theoretical underpinnings of the American Revolution or the revolution in France.[24] Nevertheless, at the time, Adams acknowledged the importance of the Washington and Paine partnership during America’s struggle for Independence.

After the war, other notable relationships such as those of Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, built during Revolutionary times, became frayed, even adversarial. As former revolutionaries labored over the next several decades in America to fashion and then lead the new nation, political polarization ended for some what had once brought them together for a common cause. Paine’s further revolutionary activities and radicalization while in Europe contributed to the demise of his and Washington’s friendship and serves as one more example.

[1] Library of Congress, George Washington Papers, www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/about-this-collection/.

[2] The author has searched in vain for the origin of this quote.

[3] Benard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), 17-19.

[4] Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols., Philip S. Foner, ed. (New York: The Citadel Press, 1969), 2:1091-1092. For an informative article on Paine’s time at the Pennsylvania Magazine, see Peter Chapin and Kara Nowakoski, “‘A Kind of Bee-Hive’: Thomas Paine and The Pennsylvania Magazine,” New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies, Scott Cleary and Ivy Linton Stabell, eds. (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2016), 51-68.

[5] George Washington to Joseph Reed, January 31, 1776, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/washington/03-03-02-0163.

[6] Washington to Reed, April 1, 1776, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-04-02-0009.

[7] Library of Congress, “Charles Lee to George Washington, January 23, 1776,” George Washington Papers 1741-1799: Series 4. General Correspondence, 1697-1799.

[8] Washington to Samuel Washington, December 18, 1776, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-07-02-0299.

[9] W.E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America’s Godfather, 1737-1809 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1945), 88.

[10] Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 1 (of 2), Ch. VII, www.gutenberg.org/files/37701/37701-h/37701-h.htm.

[11] John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York: Little, Brown, 1995), 139.

[12] David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 138.

[13] Ibid., 139.

[14] Paine, The Complete Writings, 2:1133.

[15] Ibid., 2:1164.

[16] Jett Conner, “The American Crisis Before Crossing the Delaware?”, Journal of the American Revolution, February 25, 2015, allthingsliberty.com/2015/02/american-crisis-before-crossing-the-delaware/.

[17] Paine, The Complete Writings, 1:53.

[18] Washington to James Madison, June 12, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0308.

[19] Washington and Paine were both nationalists. See Edward J. Larson, George Washington, Nationalist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

[20] Edward G. Gray, Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge: Building a United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016). Paine’s dream of building such a bridge in America was not fulfilled; but in the U.K., Paine’s iron bridge design influenced the coming industrial revolution.

[21] Jett Conner, “Rockingham, Washington’s Headquarters, 1783,” Journal of the American Revolution, April 15, 2021, allthingsliberty.com/2021/04/rockingham-washingtons-headquarters-1783/.

[22] Thomas Paine to Washington, July 30, 1796, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-0329.

[23] John Adams autobiography, pt. 1, “John Adams,” through 1776, sheet 23 of 53 (electronic edition), Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society, www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=A1_23&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fautobio1.php.

[24] J.C.D. Clark, Thomas Paine: Britain, America & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 329.