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Thomas Paine : An English American Politician Activist, Philosopher And Writer

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Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, philosopher and writer. He was born on the twenty-ninth of January 1737 at Thetford, Norfolk in England, to a Quaker father and Anglican mother. Paine received basic education, but learned to read, write and perform arithmetic. At the age of thirteen he began working, at first with his father, as a stay maker. He then later worked as an officer of the excise, hunting smugglers, and collecting liquor and tobacco taxes. Around 1760, Paine’s wife and child both died in childbirth, and his business, that of making stay ropes, went under. In the summer of 1772, Paine published “The Case of the Officers of Excise.” A twenty-one paged article in defense of higher pay for excise officers. It was his first political work, and he spent that winter in London, handing out the 4,000 copies of the article to members of Parliament and other citizens. In spring of 1774, Paine was fired from the excise office. He soon met Benjamin Franklin, who advised him to move to America and provided him with letters of prologue to the recently framed country. Paine arrived in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774, taking up his first normal occupation—serving to alter the Pennsylvania Magazine—in January 1775. As of now, Paine started writing decisively, distributed a few articles, secretly or under aliases. One of his initial articles was a blistering judgment of the African slave exchange, called "African Slavery in America," which he marked under
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