BORDENTOWN CITY: Town to fete a radical lefty on Saturday

By Amber Cox
   BORDENTOWN CITY – The 274th anniversary of the birth of a famous American Revolutionary author and patriot will be celebrated throughout the day on Saturday.
   Thomas Paine, famous for his work “Common Sense” and “Crisis,” never set down roots in one place but owned his only property right in Bordentown. He had a little cottage on Farnsworth Avenue, the site of what is now a dentist office at .
   Doug Palmieri, president of the Thomas Paine Society of Bordentown, said Paine did say at “one period in time that he would rather see his horse, Button, in his own stable or eating the grass in Bordentown than see all the pomp and show of Europe.”
   Paine’s birthday celebration will be a daylong event with a number of special presentations. Beginning at 11 a.m. George Vinter will have a presentation on Colonial toys and games in Old City Hall, 11 Crosswicks St.
   At noon General George Washington, played by Sam Davis, will read excerpts from “Common Sense” and “Crisis” in front of the Friends Meeting House, 302 Farnsworth Ave.
   Debbie Cramer will present “Thomas Paine and his Friends in Bordentown” linking Paine with Bordentown genealogy beginning at 12:30 in the Friends Meeting House, 302 Farnsworth Ave.
   James Burkhalter and “The Practitioners of Musick” will present the music of the Colonial period in Christ Episcopal Church, 130 Prince St., at 2 p.m.
   Finally, there will be tea with Gen. George Washington in Old City Hall at 3:30 p.m. for $8. Mr. Palmieri will also do a presentation on “Paine, Colonial Printing and Bookselling.” An orginal copy of “Common Sense” will also be on display.
   Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737 and later moved to London where he became involved in writing in editing. During his time in London he met Benjamin Franklin, which was “probably the most important thing about that period in his life.”
   ”Paine was also sort of attracted to, what we would call today, radical causes, so he got very interested in what was going on with the American colonies,” Mr. Palmieri said.
   But were he alive today, it is not likely that he would be a member of the Tea Party.
   ”He would be one of the left-wingers on MSNBC,” the president of his fan club theorized.
   ”In 1774, he decided to come over here to see what all the hubbub was about. Benjamin Franklin gave him a couple of letters of introduction to friends in Philadelphia, which was good for Thomas Paine because typhoid broke out on the ship on the way over and a bunch of people died.”
   In those days if a ship docked and was known as a plague ship, no one could disembark, according to Mr. Palmieri.
   ”Paine was very sick, in an out of consciousness, but when the port inspectors came on they looked through his stuff and found the letter of introduction from Franklin to some prominent Philadelphians,” he said. “They carried him off the ship and brought him to the prominent Philadelphians who nursed him back to health, otherwise there would have been no Thomas Paine, he probably would have died on the ship.”
   When Paine was healthy he began working for printers and booksellers. Soon after he decided to write a pamphlet in favor of promoting the American cause against the British, called “Common Sense.”
   ”The key thing about ‘Common Sense,’ which made it different from everything else, was that Paine, who was kind of an anti-monarchist, actually brushed away all the arguments about Parliament,” Mr. Palmieri said. “Paine went directly after the king, that was what made that pamphlet so revolutionary. He blamed the king.”
   ”Common Sense” was printed in January of 1776 and “was an immediate sensation.”
   ”The First Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia at that time so the first run sold out almost immediately,” Mr. Palmieri said. “We know that, the very first printing, virtually everyone in the First Continental Congress read it and they sent it home with instructions. That’s kind of the way that Americans got their news, as it were, in those days. They passed things around.”
   It was estimated that in the first three months there were over 100,000 copies of the pamphlet in print.
   ”In one of the greatest publishing and promotional coincidences of all time, the same day that ‘Common Sense’ hit the bookstores, a copy of King George’s speech to Parliament, which had been given at the very end of October, reached the Colonies,” Mr. Palmieri said. “In it George III was very, very critical. It was almost as though ‘Common Sense’ were an answer to that speech.”
   The first edition of “Common Sense” was only 46 pages long but Paine kept adding to it and revising it and it grew bigger with each edition.
   ”Paine did not want to retain copyright, anyone was free to reprint it who could, so within the first three months it was printed in Philadelphia, New York, Hartford, Providence, all over the place,” Mr. Palmieri said. “Within the first year it’s estimated that half a million copies were in print, both here and in Europe. When you do the math its just a phenomenal amount. It was probably the single most important political pamphlet, political statement, made at that period time.”
   According to Mr. Palmieri, the Colonists knew they had grievances going back to the stand back of the 1760s. They blamed Parliament but very few wanted to break away from England, only the most radical ones.
   ”They wanted to mend fences, the wanted representation in Parliament, no taxation without representation, that whole thing” Mr. Palmieri said. “There was really no serious talk of breaking away. When the serious talk of breaking away began most of the Colonial leaders and most of the Continental Congress didn’t really want to do that.”
   However, Paine’s pamphlet was so influential that there was a rush among the population of America.
   ”Though they had been talking about this thing for years, almost six months to the day of the pamphlet coming out, we had the Declaration of Independence, and we broke away.”
   George Washington read “Common Sense” to his troops and translated it into French and German.
   ”Paine, later on, became what people called ‘America’s first war correspondent’ but that’s not really true in the sense that we know it today,” Mr. Palmieri said. “He did travel around though. He did visit the troops. He visited Washington. He was at Valley Forge for a while and it was during that period that he wrote a series of essays of articles called “Crisis.”
   The first article of “Crisis” begins with those famous words, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” and was done “in sort of the darkest days of the Revolution.”
   Mr. Paine died in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1809.
   ”Then the mystery starts, he was buried in New Rochelle (New York) but almost immediately the body was moved from one place to another, and they kept moving his bones,” Mr. Palmieri said. “His bones were later shipped to England and no one is exactly sure what happened to them from there. Nobody knows where Thomas Paine’s bones are.”