Thomas Paine Influence On American Slavery

Have we ever wondered what it is like to come from being born poor and then as we start growing up we become famous in whatever we want to do? This is the case for the famous author Thomas Paine. Paine was born in 1737 in England and his parents were very poor. His father worked as a farmer and his mother worked as a corsetmaker. During his teenage years, “He attended the local school until, at the age of 13, he withdrew to help his father” quoting from this made me feel very sad for Paine at this time, because I’m sure that he did not want to quit school just at the age thirteen; he wanted to continue on into school so he could pursue a career in writing journals, poems, and possibly even writing his own books and become a very famous author

This shows me that Thomas Paine wants to get straight to the facts when he writes about American slavery during the time he spent in America. It also states in the Common Sense that “In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided everything which is personal among ourselves” which I think this means that Thomas Paine wanted to go to just the facts when he was writing Common Sense; he did not just want to use opinions from other people. When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, he made many arguments when he was making references to the Constitution in America and in England. He states that “Moving to consider ‘the so much boasted Constitution of England,’ Paine argued that this consisted of three segments, ‘the remains of monarchial tyranny in the person of the king,’ ‘the remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers’ and the new Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons.’ The freedom of England, Paine insisted, depended solely on the virtue of the latter, for ‘in a constitutional sense’ neither king nor peers were dedicated to freedom”