Thomas paine (1737-1809)

One of the most popular exponents of the Age of Reason—the most persuasive writer of the American Revolution—came from an unlikely background. The poorly educated son of a corset maker, Thomas Paine was born in England. He spent the first thirty-seven years of his life drifting through a number of occupations: corset maker, grocer, tobacconist, schoolteacher, and excise man (a government employee who examined goods and levied excise taxes on them). In 1774, Paine was dismissed from the excise for attempting to organize the employees in a demand for higher wages (an unusual activity in those days). Like many others at that time and since, he came to America to make a new start.

With a letter of introduction from Ben Franklin, whom he had met in London, Paine went to Philadelphia, where he worked as a journalist. In the disagreement between England and the Colonies, he instantly identified with the cause of the underdog. In January of 1776, he published the most important pamphlet in support of American independence: Common Sense.

In this forty-seven-page pamphlet, Paine denounced King George III as a "royal brute" and asserted that a continent should not remain tied to an island. The pamphlet sold half a million copies—in a country whose total population was roughly two and a quarter million.

That same year—1776—Paine joined the Continental Army as it retreated across New Jersey to Philadelphia. During the journey, he began writing what would be a series of sixteen pamphlets called The American Crisis. In these, he commented on the course of the war and urged his countrymen not to give up the fight. The first of these pamphlets was read to Washington's troops in December of 1776, a few days before they recrossed the Delaware River to attack Trenton.

After the Revolution, Paine lived peacefully in New York and New Jersey until 1787, when he returned to Europe. There he became involved once more in radical revolutionary politics.

Revolutionary times were over in America, but they were just beginning in France. On July 14, 1789, the French Revolution began in Paris with the storming of the Bastille by an angry mob. Paine, who considered himself a citizen of the world, soon found a platform for his ideas. Here, in Paris, Paine has written the main philosophical product "Century of reason ", becoming an ideological banner for English democracy. In France in 1791, he composed The Rights of Man, a reply to the English statesman Edmund Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution.

The Rights of Man was an impassioned defense of republican government and a call to the English people to overthrow their king. Although he was outside the country, Paine was tried for treason and outlawed from England. Sate in France from English law, he was briefly celebrated as a hero of the French Revolution but soon imprisoned for being a citizen of an enemy nation (England). James Monroe, the American minister to France at the time, secured Paine's release in 1794 by insisting that Paine was an American citizen.

The first part of Paine's last great work. The Age of Reason, appeared that year; the second part was published two years later. The Age of Reason was Paine's statement of belief and an explanation of the principles of deism. The book was controversial in America, where it was not fully understood and was thought to be atheistic.

When the author of the book finally returned to America in 1802, he found himself an outcast. He had been stripped of his right to vote, he had no money, and he was continually harassed as a dangerous radical and atheist. When he died in New York, Paine was denied burial in consecrated ground. His body was buried in a corner of the farm he owned in New Rochelle.

Even in death, though, Thomas Paine was not allowed to rest. In 1819, an English sympathizer dug up Paine's body and removed it and the coffin to England, intending to erect a monument the author of The Rights of Man. But no monument was ever built. The last record of Paine's remains shows that the coffin and the bones were acquired by a furniture dealer in England in 1844.

However “Clubs of Thomas Paine” organized in America and in England after his death testify that the ideas of the great American democrat have kept a deep track in national memory. English and American romantics have perceived his atheistic ideas, his unconditional conviction of an authority “of large money”.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Architect, botanist, paleontologist, linguist, musician, and statesman, Thomas Jefferson displayed the wide range of interests that we associate with the eighteenth-century mind at its best. President John F. Kennedy reminded listeners of this once at an official dinner honoring winners of the Nobel Prize. Kennedy said that the White House had not seen such a great collection of talent since Thomas Jefferson dined there alone. Like Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson longed for time for his own research; also like Franklin, he was too valuable to his country to be spared such time for very long.

Jefferson was born in the red-clay country of what is now Albemarle County, Virginia, on 400 acres of land that his father had acquired for a bowl of punch. (Like many Virginians, Jefferson's father was land-hungry. When he died, he left his son more than 5,000 acres.) The elder Jefferson, a surveyor and magistrate, died when Thomas was fourteen. But he had provided his son with an excellent classical education and encouraged the many scientific interests that would occupy Jefferson for the rest of his life.

After attending the College of William and Mary, Jefferson became a lawyer. Soon he was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he established friendships with other young public servants, such as Patrick Henry. He was a spokesman for the rights of personal liberty and religious freedom, and a vocal opponent of institutions that infringed on those rights. In 1774, he wrote a pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in which he urged the rejection of all British Parliamentary authority over the Colonies. The House of Burgesses considered the pamphlet's proposals too radical, but A Summary View established Jefferson's reputation as a writer and a thinker. Two years later, when he was thirty-three, his fame as a writer brought him an extraordinary opportunity. The Continental Congress elected him one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence.

Four other writers worked with him on the wording of the Declaration that was submitted to the Congress: John Adams of Massachusetts; Roger Sherman of Connecticut; Robert L. Livingston of New York; and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania. Few changes were made by these other writers, but the Congress insisted on several major alterations. Jefferson was upset by what he called "mutilations" of his document.

During the Revolution, Jefferson served for a time as governor of Virginia. When the British invaded Virginia, he retired to Monticello, the home he had designed himself. There he devoted himself to the pleasures of family life and to scientific research. He composed most of his Notes on the State of Virginia during this period.

Jefferson's beloved wife died in 1782. A year later he returned to public life, in part as an escape from private grief. He served as minister to France and, with Benjamin Franklin, helped to negotiate the treaty that formally ended the Revolutionary War in 1783. He later became George Washington's secretary of state. After losing the 1796 presidential election to John Adams, he served as Adams's vice-president (a post that, at that time, was awarded to the loser in the presidential contest).

In 1800, Jefferson was elected America's third president. A determined opponent of federal power, Jefferson was nevertheless responsible for one of the most sweeping federal actions of his age—the Louisiana Purchase. The acquisition from France of more than 820,000 square miles of western land would later be divided into thirteen states.

After his presidency ended in 1809, Jefferson retired once again to Monticello. Much of his energy during these years of retirement was devoted to establishing the University of Virginia. Jefferson helped to plan its courses of study and designed many of its buildings; he was its first rector. One of first students of it was great American poet and prose writer Edgar Alanines Poe. Jefferson founded the first in America " Fund for needs of enlightenment".

In 1826, both Jefferson (at eighty-three) and John Adams (at ninety) became gravely ill. Both hoped to live to see the fiftieth anniversary of the independence they had done so much to ensure. Jefferson died on the morning of July 4, several hours before Adams (whose last words were, "Thomas Jefferson still survives"). The epitaph Jefferson composed for himself clearly states which of his many accomplishments he considered most important:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.

RESPONDING TO THE DECLARATION'('The Declaration of Indépendance", 1775) The Declaration opens with a rational statement defending an act that was to have violent consequences.

Jefferson frequently employs parallelism, which is the repeated use of sentences, clauses, or phrases with identical or similar structures. For example, when he cites the truths that are "self-evident," he begins each clause with that. The parallelism emphasizes Jefferson's view that all these truths are of equal importance.