When Thomas Paine passed away at his small farm in New Rochelle, New York in 1809, he was impoverished and largely reviled.

In the United States, then undergoing a dramatic religious revival, he was slandered as an “infidel” and a “drunk” for his attacks on Christianity and his rumored personal moral depravity. This, on top of his tirades against George Washington, the Federalists, and slavery, had decimated his reputation in the country he helped found.

Across the Atlantic, Paine was condemned as a traitor to the Crown and a dangerous rabble-rouser for his passionate defense of the French Revolution in Rights of Man, convicted in absentia for seditious libel, and burned in effigy throughout Britain. No single person was seen as a greater threat to the political establishments of his day than Paine, both in the monarchies of Europe and in his own American Republic.