Paine, Penn, and the Revolutions of Philadelphia

The story of Thomas Paine and the impact of his bestselling Common Sense upon the course of the American Revolution, while familiar, retains its dramatic power. Beginning in early 1776, this pamphlet and the popular debates that followed helped push the Continental Congress toward independence in July and the state of Pennsylvania to its republican Constitution in September. There is also another, lesser-known story about Paine and the development of his radical reflections, and it centers around the College.

When Paine arrived, nearly unknown, in Philadelphia late in 1774, he rented a dwelling at Front and Market Streets, across from the London Coffee House in the heart of the busy city. He roomed next door to printer Robert Aitken and wrote articles for Aitken’s Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775. Paine also connected with a group of freethinking artisans, laborers, teachers, doctors, and artists.

Among this group, whom historian Eric Foner has labeled the “Philadelphia radicals,” several were closely connected with the university:

• Benjamin Rush, doctor and Professor in the Medical School
• James Cannon, Mathematics Professor in the College
• David Rittenhouse, clockmaker and astronomer, who constructed the monumental Orrery for the College in the 1770s, and was later professor and trustee of the University

Others who were part of this circle were Timothy Matlack, a brewer; Christopher Marshall, a pharmacist; Thomas Young, a doctor; Owen Biddle, a clockmaker; and the portraitist Charles Wilson Peale. Rush would later claim that he worked closely with Paine on the text of Common Sense, and Rittenhouse and others may have read a draft of the text.

Regardless of who authored which words, these conversations were the substance of the independence movement. Far from the salon exchanges fostered by Provost William Smith in the 1750s, these were intense debates over monarchies, republics, social structures, and moral responsibility. Although records are limited, it is tempting to imagine these fervent arguments taking place in and near the College grounds, and perhaps in some classes.

Paine and the “radicals” would lead an independence movement that turned Pennsylvania from a conservative colony into one of the most politically progressive new states on Earth. That process played out around the Declaration debates of 1776 and produced the Pennsylvania Constitution, which many considered, in the words of Penn historian Sophia Rosenfeld, “a marvel” of republican thinking, and which others thought a shocking and risky experiment.