In these, he often addressed the British Crown and warned of the Americans' united spirit: "In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in you had only armies to contend with; in this case, you have both an army and a country to combat with," (Paine, Crisis 68). During this time he was also appointed to the position of secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs in 1777. Paine was partially responsible for securing supplying deals with France for the benefit of the American war effort. Yet overall, his role in the war was that of an essayist, in the aim of promoting American morale by artfully composing works that reminded the individual colonist of the ideals for which he or she fought and sacrificed. In this role, he attained significant acclaim and made a name for himself among commoner and elite political theorists alike.
The general philosophical movement within which Paine found himself in the late eighteenth century originated in the earlier English Revolution; but Paine was partially responsible for bringing the original ideals of John Locke and Rousseau into the context of the American and French Revolutions. From the seventeenth century on, Western societies increasingly began to question the legitimacy of the divine rule held by monarchs. In England this trend was seeded by the seemingly unjustifiable wars and taxes under King John, and became fully fledged following Henry VIII's utter overhaul of the English Church for purely personal aims. France, on the other hand, lacked the same tradition of limited government that their northern neighbors extolled, but seriously began to embrace radical notions of freedom and revolution as economic crises magnified the excesses and injustices of the noble class. In the American colonies, analogous inequities and encroachments upon freedom caused not only a movement away from the king who was deemed responsible, but a reincarnation of the forms of democracy birthed in ancient Greece and practiced in early Rome. The common notion to emerge from all three revolutions was that a collective government of representatives could more effectively address the needs of a society, and that these communal needs were philosophically more valuable than the singular ambitions of a monarch. Although, the eventual outcomes of the three struggles seem to illustrate the two most probable products of revolution, they all reveal the fact that quickly became apparent to all rulers in the west: that no government can stand without the support of the people.
Paine's involvement in these movements originated with his experience in America during the revolution. At the conclusion of the war, Paine argued in favor of the Pennsylvania constitution, and because of his actions, he was appointed to the position of clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly. This job allowed him to put together legislation that supported his most deeply held beliefs about mankind and the morally just functioning of government. Essentially, he pushed for the gradual emancipation of all slaves within Pennsylvania, as well as for the equal rights of women under the Pennsylvania constitution. At the same time, he argued in favor of the centralization of the American government, in the hopes of forming a powerful, cohesive federal government, rather than a mere collection of independent states. It was this vision, combined with his opposition of slavery that caused Paine to oppose the expansion of Virginia's territories into the West.
Still, political essay-writing, policy formation and philosophy were not Thomas Paine's only activities in the years immediately following the war. He dabbled in engineering as well. Paine designed a bridge he planned to have built across the Schuylkill River; when funds for this project began to fall low, he traveled to France to seek additional aid, but found himself in the middle of what was becoming the French Revolution. The monarchs of France had enjoyed near absolute power for nearly a century when Louis XVI came to power; Louis XIV had declared his divine right as ruler of France in 1715. Additionally, the aristocracy and clergy had positioned themselves such that their privileged place under the King was difficult to unseat. The result was that the economic depravity that should have affected the entire nation fell almost completely upon the commoners. The only means the government could offer to check the King's power was through the Estates General which was divided into three sections: the aristocracy, the clergy, and the commoners. Not surprisingly, as hardships fell unduly upon the members of the third estate...
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