certainly graft is a feature of any bureaucracy in the british empire is certainly an example of a bloated bureaucracy at the end of the 18th century. i think of british india at the time when humble english civil servants will go to india on a tour of duty, effectively in the embassy over there, but would come back astonishingly wealthy. where had the got all of that money? rtuns abound in organizations like an empire. some of that was public knowledge. the british newspapers, and thomas payne lived in england until 1774 remember, the british newspapers were not the governments pocket like some of them still today. they were often fierce critics of government for waste and abuse. it is entirely possible that

payne was a consumer of british newspaper reporting and aware of some of that stuff. the fact he uses numbers to get that point across is also not surprising to me. payne had a great head for numbers. he was in -- a tax collector for several years while he was living in england. that may also have given him some degree of privileged information although i would not want to over egg that. and when he wrote common sense you are probably well aware that that section of it is full of numbers showing that we have the math on that side we have got enough trees, we've got enough men, i got enough wood. it got enough hemp and we can pay for it all to actually fight and win this ongoing war for independence. so what you are referring to, i think is actually one of the core features of pain as a writer. he's not just good with letters

and words he's also good with numbers. peter: you mention thomas payne was a writer and had other books published quickly. here's a look at works by thomas payne, common sense 1776. the american crisis, a serie that came out from 1776 to 1783. rights of ma 1791, post war. in the age of reason, his last book 1794. sylvia and cary north carolina asks how did people in england regard common sense? the fact -- was the fact that many colonists reading it of concern to people in england? richard: that is putting it mildly. yes. the british government officials who left the thickest records for us to read said quite a lot about common sense when it was published. they knew from their

correspondence in the american colonies want to smash hit this pamphlet was. they wanted to read it for themselves, copies of the pamphlet were circulating in london and within two months of it being published in philadelphia -- and that was someone put some copies of it on a ship and sailed it there. so british government officials could read themselves. it is a matter of national security at think, they wanted to find out what was in this political pamphlet and when they read it they were suitably concerned. so we have a report that circulating in london that march that our reading it voraciously and that the people who have been publicly against the calls for independence up until then are and being -- are being immediately converted. like magic, like harry potter is casting a spell. -- casting a spell.

communicating the fear and paranoia that this is something incredibly important that is beyond our control. >> david is in las vegas. good evening. i want to very briefly issued a quote from thomas payne saying a body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody. i invite everyone to make the relevant comparisons. my question was thomas payne was good with numbers as you say. he was still on the same team and his writing was certainly profound. my question is why did he die broke?

poor? like edgar allen poe, forgotten. why did he die destitute? was he irresponsible? was there probably don't know about? request go ahead and answer him. plus i don't want to preempt anything else you have planned here. to answer dave's excellent question, and i will tantalize little bit. as david well knows, when tom paine died, i think he was 1809. he died nearly alone. he left a will asking to be buried in the burial ground by quakers in new york. this was what he grew up on back in new england.

quick refused that request. you might be surprised to hear about that. when his executors took him up to a farm in new rochelle to be buried, this was given him by the state of new york for his services. he was born with props on the people attending his funeral. whereby, for comparison, 20,000 people attended ben franklin' work. there was going the dichotomy. he died in something approaching poverty, and physical torment. most likely suffering from alcohol addiction and acute depression as well. he died as a political poor. who no home in the two-party

system started to emerge in american politics. over the course of our limited time, i hope we can get to the extraordinary transformation. cloaks to the comments on his influence and of the constitution were his arguments discussed during the constitutional convention? >> i think that the fact that he called this a system of laws is very much a funny idea that we should return to specify who is more power so the people who they have a lot of power chunk of seats and see if they have the power they think they have. dennis found that idea. i think pain has gone to england by 1787.

it is certainly not working at the national level of politics at that particular time. he does have a rule in pennsylvania constitution. " talked about teaching and we from them as well. we want to shoot some video with you. he teaches 18 courses at troy high school in troy, michigan. here he was talking about how he teaches common sense. course students need to have more sources to learn about the mood of the country during the revolutionary era and beyond looking at the declaration of independence. if we are looking at different documents and different books and pamphlets, we need to provide this about the mood of the american people. thomas payne is one of those early american muckrakers were

his providing context and with a stirring common sense is a great example of that. this clearly on when you read common sense. he just despises monarchy. you also get thomas payne's writing and he is really holding a lot of the lightning thinkers and their theories. that is something when you read the declaration of independence, you have been utilizing a lot of the same topics in his writing. you can see those thinkers and the influence they have on writers, thinkers, scholars from that era. that will help students to make that connection. as much as it pains my heart as a political science teacher, i love political theory, i think it is fascinating but maybe it is not the favorite thing of teenagers. learning about the social contract theory and natural

rights. i can't to take talks about this. or i can. i don't know. when students do have the opportunity in class to learn social contract theory were natural rights, may be pulling -- x -- an exit from common sense would be useful. maybe, in this concept here. that makes it more real and more relevant. and then the opportunity to try to find some of those examples in real life and then you can tell this to the coming day. quick students have a lot of difficulty with texts that are older. when you're looking at texts from the 1700s, obviously the language has changed a bit. the phrasing has changed a little bit. i see this when i teach federalist papers or anti-federalist papers. students have problems with

common sense challenges. it is really having to take the time with students and dive into what they mean and once they start to make those connections, that is something you can get beyond. close once they get this to the format of a text, the other thing is thomas payne gets into presentation of his idea form of government and i know john adams your thought that his ideas were terrible and they are not the best but that is something -- all different suggestions he is making can really prevent students with some difficulty if they can't see what his ideas were for how to set up an ideal government. close as we explore thomas payne common sense in this program, part of the list of -- this was the first book published in america.

ben franklin is on the list with experiments and observations on electricity published in 1751. and the way to wealth in 1758. a grammatical institute of the english language. and isaiah thomas printed a curious hieroglyphic bible. they have a survey with the roads of the united states of america and then franklin's autobiography was published in 1793. the first american cookbook was released in 1796 by amelia simmons. and you can seehe library of congress possible list at loc.gov. and check our website for more information on what is featured in the series at c-span.org/ books that shaped america.

chris richard bell, here are some of the other books on the library list from that era. we have been talking about thomas payne's other books. >> these are the missing pieces in response to the colors. a question about why the -- what he died alone and unloved. the american pictures left common sense. jorgensen for instance he greatly admired. but it was the other works he wrote subsequently. they endedo endorse the unfolding fren revolution is sort of a sister struggle to america's own revolution that lighing struck.

in that fear struck twice in france. he was a cheerleader for the fren revolution in the early phase. he wrote to burton, hoping that his endorsement of the american revolution and french revolution would stir up in english, british social revolution and turn out people from buckingham palace and all the rotten boroughs. it is still some sort of genuine egalitarian democracy there. did that make him any friends in england? among leaders of the rights of man, yes. among political authorities, absolutely not. he was effectively chased out of england over the past few years and trust with sedition and treason. england would never be a home for him again. and then two years later, he is in france as the revolution

continues, they are enfold and accelerate. the 1793, it is actually very nasty, bloody, anarchic image of the guillotine come into your mind. that is the air without pain found himself in france. a revolution that had room -- run amok. it had become too radical for him. the only chaos by this time. he made some terrible political mistakes of telling french revolutionaries that they should not execute the king, they should banish them. instead. so he wrote a second work in the 1790's called the age of reason in which he laid the blame for the anarchy of the french revolution at the feet of atheism. >> would you call him a christian?

>> he called himself a believer in god. people accused him of being an atheist which was ironic because he wrote a book denouncing atheism. he was a spiritual person who believed in god but did not believe in organized religion. chris thank you for holding. you are on with our guest, richard bell. quick thank you so much for taking my call. i am wondering what sort of influence thomas payne's writing had on future revolutionaries, i.e., gandhi, ho chi minh and what was indochina and also a different location, i am thinking of the revolution in haiti. and also, why did the quakers

reject him? >> thank you, man. question. i am not the right person to answer this. i will defer to other scholars out there but i can tell you a couple of quick things about tom pain. and slavery and other political causes of the 18th century. pain was antislavery and in his newspaper writing in philadelphia, he published a paper that we think he wrote denouncing slavery and we can also see at the more general level of commitment to making a democracy that works for as many people as possible. a broader human rights agenda. also arguably a friend of the women's rights campaign. some of those were really attributed to him. we can actually be sure.

he certainly had a much broader influence than just on the narrow question of nationhood. chris we want to introduce you to noah. she is at the institute for thomas payne studies. this is in new rochelle, new york. what is the institute? >> thank you for having me. the institute for thomas payne studies was founded to really study the life and legacy of pain. this was the last year of his life in new rochelle. part of the means not only studying pain himself but more broadly examine subjects that he engaged with. objects of expression. that is come up already. we look at these issues not only from the historical past but connected to the present.

public history as well. >> a few years back, there was some research that came from thomas payne study. it is refined? >> over the last decade, there has been a lot of research around leadership and thomas payne. several years ago, a member of our research team, a previously unknown draft of the declaration, possibly attributed to roger sherman which is one of the five established contributors. to this day, we are still learning about fragmented materials from the 18th century. this is one of those instances. there are a small number of working drafts in the declaration. this document was held by a private collector and was originally added to the declarations resource project.

and what the research team observed was reference here. as everybody heard over the last hour, he was a deeply influential figure in american independence, he was a key part of the munication network from philadelphia and around north america. from one vantage, you can see pain as an 18th century equivalent of social media influences. he was in close contact with the contributors to the declaration answered in the hot and impact on common sense. there was published name in six months prior. this manuscript grants there is a possibility that he had an even more direct hand in the process than necessary. plus augustine from the

university of north maryland. richard bell has a question for you. close going to about this exciting research. it suggests the promise of overturning her with all we knew, but cain did not have a fingerprint on the declaration, if you are able to and so might demonstrate that he did, what is at stake do you think? in that revelation? >> a great question. i so enjoyed listening to the show over the last bit. this is -- it is the writer or artist to make their own distinct impression. with the concept is much more important 18th-century. they were understood to be off anonymous.

one of the most intriguing aspects of this research from my perspective is that it happens to better understand the collaborative processes across time and space. there really shedding light on democracy and media today. your colleague has been working on the specific project and they recently retired. we will see what comes next. >> what is in your view the legacy of thomas payne? while she was starting today? >> i think the conversation should be left alone. just to show that historical knowledge is not -- this as ways of understanding emerge.

he is far from an elite, quite the opposite. he had a really deep knowledge of history and how it was formed. how he approached the promises of documents like the declaration. i think those egalitarian beliefs from this position. there on -- the authenticity as well as democratic institutions. they could help us navigate our current moment. thank you for spending a few minutes on the way that books shipped america.

crows there are memorials, england, france, new jersey and new yo. blic schools are named after thomas payne. a couple of plays have been written about thomas payne. the persecuted lovers of civil and ous liberty.

thank you for holding. please go ahead. quite think of you taking my call. what a privilege and pleasure to speak to you john. >> thomas payne and john adams had a struggle. he wrote something that is somewhat critical of george washington and his leadership. he died with very -- relatively little money. was he as a person disliked at his time? he may have written great work but how was he perceived by the people? >> thank you, sir, appreciate it. >> excellent questions by all these colors so far. you might say it is a sweeping generalization.

a lot of people had a lot of affections for tom pain. they regarded him as one of their own. which of course, he was. they also regarded him as having his best interests. the limited that because local partisanship, we might call this a polarization starting to emerge. in the decades after the american revolution. before pain died in 1809. by the time he comes back to this area, baltimore and washington, 1802, having been away in europe or 15, 16 years, he is not welcome everywhere. there are plenty of working people. buy him a drink at the local bar which he is happy to accept. there are also politicians usually associated with what is

called the federalist party which would be in the tradition of george washington and alexander hamilton. it regarded him as far too for working people. partisanship really did. even though he was sympathetic to the -- to the business of the other party at the time which was confusingly named the democratic republic and party, that party headed by jefferson, where pain increasingly was a political liability. too extreme, too closely associated with the violence of the french revolution. and his name became martin in political circles. his own social life diminished and people yelled terrible things at him.

>> oneore quote from common sense, society is produced by our wants. all by restr, long habit of not thinking a thing wrong. and it raises the fermentable outcry. but time makes more converts than reason. we have about a minute left. go ahead. >> have been saying interesting things. i found what was really great for me was how we could as americans possibly see having a revolution because of what i

remember reading. and not be as available as it seemed to be. he left the impression that we could indeed do this. did you mention whether his name was on the declaration of independence? i don't believe it was. >> we will leave it there. professor bell. >>'s name is not on the declaration of independence. new research shows he may have been shown a draft. there were a draft on the declaration as if they would show it to someone. could that have been thomas payne? question to you the legacy of thomas payne in 10 words or less. >> a commitment to republicanism , tooth democracy, transparency,

accountability and the rights and liberties of ordinary people. >> if you read common sense please get that message? >> tom crean worked incredibly hard to make sure that you do. because we have been talking about common sense and the first inerrancy was the book that shaped america. we appreciate you being with us. now, the list the library of congress he met with in 2013 is not a cap reactive list. there are 100 books on there. it is not a copper has of list. it is not the best sellers are the best books. you can go to c-spaor/books that shaped americ