Dear Friend,

Thomas Paine may finally be getting his due. He isn’t exactly a founding father, more like a founding thinker, and advocate for church-state separation. But he never got a statue in Washington DC, never got a Broadway musical. One of those should be changing soon. Congressman Jamie Raskin has introduced a bill that would authorize a Thomas Paine memorial in Washington DC. Remarkably, the money has already been privately raised. The memorial and a site just need to be approved. You can help!

In 1776 Paine published a pamphlet, Common Sense, that crystallized the case for the American Revolution. It sold 150,000 copies immediately, and by the end of the war sold 500,000 in a new nation of about 2.5 million people. That’s like selling 66,000,000 copies today. And many who didn’t buy a copy heard it read aloud. During the war he wrote 13 more pamphlets in a series known as The American Crisis that bolstered the morale of the colonists and clarified the issues at stake in language people could understand.

The first of those 13 pamphlets was written while Paine was embedded with the Continental Army at Valley Forge. He walked 35 miles through snow to Philadelphia to have it printed. Washington had his officers read it to every soldier. It began, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Three days later the army crossed the Delaware, surprised the British at Trenton, and revived the flagging support for the war.