There is something I have always thought America was missing.

Visiting the nation’s capital and observing the severe Greco-Roman architecture, one sees the names of America’s greatest leaders everywhere, on memorials constructed in marble and stone. There can be something spiritual about these edifices. The Washington Monument soars up to the heavens, a symbol of the grandeur of the nation’s first chief magistrate. There is Abraham Lincoln in repose on his throne, looking toward the Capitol. Not far away sits the smaller monument to Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin, FDR, and MLK are nearby.

Traveling throrough other cities, one sees America’s founders everywhere: polymathic Ben Franklin in Philadelphia, the original capital; John Adams in Boston; Alexander Hamilton in New York; and a host of Virginians — Madison, Henry, Mason — honored in the Old Dominion.

But one name I have yet to see anywhere prominently is the literary father of this country: Thomas Paine. It is mystifying. In a nation that loves to dramatize and memorialize its history, loves to put up monuments and argue about them, the legacy and story of Thomas Paine have gone mostly unremembered. Not only did he write the words that convinced Americans to take up independence, Paine opposed slavery before doing so was popular, argued for women’s rights, supported free public education, and championed workers.

Paine was a penniless immigrant from England who came to America later than the other Founders: 1774. He fell in love with America’s rugged democratic spirit and worked as an editor for a Pennsylvania magazine, publishing essays in support of American liberty. The following year, he wrote his masterpiece, “Common Sense,” and penned the words that spawned the American Revolution. After it was published in January 1776, everyone read “Common Sense” in taverns and homes and passed it around like contraband. Some half a million copies were printed, and Paine donated the proceeds to purchase supplies for the Continental Army.

His words sparked the Revolution because they were written for the common person. Until that point, Americans had clung to the notion that the King was virtuous but Parliament was crooked. Paine’s pamphlet transformed the rebellion into a revolution for liberty. In his slashing style, Paine inspired Americans to reach for the future. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he wrote. Six months later, the Continental Congress published the Declaration of Independence.

A pen feared on two continents

Who was Thomas Paine, this farmer’s son, this corset maker and working-class boy from England? Paine had no formal education but was gifted in the art of writing. He met Benjamin Franklin in London in 1772 and, with Franklin’s help, migrated to America, where he would reinvent himself. Paine had an outsider’s fresh eyes, a sharp alertness, and a desire to leave the barbarism of Europe behind. He would eventually befriend Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and all the other Founders. He would take the principles of enlightenment and revolution and universalize them, seeing in America the hope for all nations. “The cause of America,” he wrote in “Common Sense,” “is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Like some of Paine’s other writings, this was published anonymously, but everyone would soon know the name. “Common Sense” turned an inchoate battle against Britain into a rallying call for self-government.

When it came time for battle, Paine dropped his quill and grabbed his musket, serving as an aide-de-camp to Nathaniel Greene, fighting honorably alongside George Washington. But when the hopes of the patriots soured and the bitter winter beckoned, Paine took a leave from the army to publish his “American Crisis” essays to uplift their spirits. So poignant were his words that General Washington ordered his soldiers to read these essays aloud during the critical winter of 1776-77. Paine also was selected by the Continental Congress as secretary for the Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1777, becoming, in effect, America’s first secretary of state.

Well after the American Revolution was secured, revolution broke out in Paris and Paine went to France to support the cause of freedom there, even serving on the committee to draft a French constitution. His great work in defense of the principle of rights, “The Rights of Man,” distilled the idea that humans had fundamental rights that were above those of any king or queen. The book was banned in Britain.

Here was a gifted polemicist, the most feared pen on two continents. He would alienate friends and admirers alike with his opinions, arguing for the democratic principles of self-government and free expression that we now take for granted.

And yet, compared with the other Founders, Paine is practically forgotten. There is no monument to him in the capital. Schoolchildren barely know him. Even American history aficionados will gladly overlook Thomas Paine to wax lyrical about the other Thomas. Unlike the other Founders, Thomas Paine never formally served in the new United States government. But gaining political power was never Paine’s objective. His causes were the ideals that birthed America.

The great unspoken divide at Philadelphia, in the moment of Independence and later during the writing of the Constitution, was the issue of slavery. Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and other Founders either had slaves or let slavery be. But to Paine, slavery was a wicked and sinful institution. “That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain,” an anonymous essay in Paine’s magazine began. He later helped draft Pennsylvania’s first abolition law.

One mystery that has remained about the Declaration of Independence is the original passage that denounced slavery, later deleted. Referring to King George, it reads: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery into another hemisphere or to insure miserable death in their transportation thither.” This remarkable sentence condemns the king, accuses him of perpetuating slavery, and deplores the transatlantic trade in humans. This is not something Thomas Jefferson would have said. But Thomas Paine vehemently opposed slavery. Moreover, the intense opprobrium poured on the king sounds like Paine.

This helps explain why there is a theory out there, in the quiet corners of Paine fandom, that suggests it was Paine who authored the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. He took no credit for drafting it, which fits with Paine’s character, and the evidence that he did write the draft is cursory and circumstantial. Paine lived in Philadelphia. He was close friends with Thomas Jefferson, who would take credit for the authorship only toward the end of his life. And the Declaration and its stylistic choices are reminiscent of Paine’s. Writers in the 19th century publicly argued that Paine was the Declaration’s first drafter. “From all the facts,” noted one writer in 1887, after an exhaustive recounting of Jefferson’s cryptic denials of authorship, “there is no doubt the original draft was Mr. Paine’s Common Sense systematized into a Declaration of Independence by Mr. Paine and handed to Mr. Jefferson, who only copied it.” Other 19th-century writers simply took it for granted that Paine was the author. “[Jefferson] says that in drafting . . . he turned to neither book nor pamphlet,” said one writer in 1881. “True enough, for the draft was already prepared by Paine.”

Historians aren’t convinced, however, that Paine was the Declaration’s first drafter. “I don’t think Paine wrote any of the Declaration,” Brown University professor Gordon Wood told me a few years ago. “But it was edited by Franklin, Adams, and the Congress. Jefferson made no claim to originality. Much of it was conventional liberal wisdom.”

I would add only that Paine himself was an important reason why these ideas were mainstream. At a minimum, Paine had some influence over America’s founding document, perhaps greater than has been recorded. Whether by osmosis or more direct influence, Thomas Paine spread passion for American independence. Without the pen of Paine, John Adams would say later, “the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Words that inspired Obama

It was only when Paine stridently attacked Christianity and the Bible, in “The Age of Reason,” published in 1794, that he lost followers. Paine was not an atheist; he believed in a non-intervening deity that was evidenced by the order of nature and the universe. But in the 1790s, even the appearance of atheism could get a man canceled.

Most of Paine’s friends abandoned him. Polite American society shunned him. Still, the book was a bestseller, and Paine dedicated it to his “Fellow Citizens of the United States of America.” The separation of church and state and the guarantee of free speech — even radical speech — that Paine championed had been constitutionalized by the Founders in the First Amendment. For the first time in world history, a secular sovereign would govern a republic where citizens were free to speak their minds.

The French Revolution was an issue that split both the American people and Washington’s cabinet. The debate continues to this day: To what extent should America assist people abroad who are yearning for freedom? The great fissure that Paine exposed was whether the American experiment in democracy was limited to America or could be extended to all peoples. He was arrested in Paris for getting on the wrong side of the radical Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre and narrowly missed execution only because the jailer marked the wrong side of his door. (Paine also met Napoleon in France, later describing the dictator as “the completest charlatan that ever existed.”)

Following the French Revolution, Paine was left broke, broken, and alone. He thought George Washington had abandoned him to the guillotine and should have done more to procure his release. He was only able to return to the United States because his good friend Thomas Jefferson was by then president. But Paine was left fuming and evincing the weakness of radicals: If emotion drives them to be righteous fighters for justice, it can also curdle into personal acrimony that harms the cause. Paine picked up his pen again and did the unthinkable, viciously attacking George Washington in print.

Paine died in New York City in 1809. Only six people attended his funeral. There is a small plaque on the building where he passed away and a modest statue in New Rochelle, N.Y., where his farm was.

“Let it be told to the future world,” Paine wrote in the crucible of the American struggle, “that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city, and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.” These were Paine’s words that George Washington’s patriots read while they shivered around campfires. And two centuries later, they were the words — and Paine was the Founding Father — that America’s first Black president quoted in his inaugural address.

At a moment of democratic regress in America, it’s time that Thomas Paine be given his due. A memorial and library should be established in his honor in Washington, D.C., one dedicated to the rights of all people and the principles of free inquiry and opposition to tyranny. Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced such legislation last year, which would establish a privately funded memorial to Paine in D.C. It would be worthy even if it had to be done with public money, for Thomas Paine was the exemplary citizen, the champion of the underdog, the hopeful immigrant, a man who stood on principle when doing so was hard. His words still echo through the ages.