Thomas Paine was born in England in 1737 but emigrated to British North America in 1774 and became a citizen of Pennsylvania. In 1776, he published the most widely read pamphlet of the era, Common Sense, an eloquent and persuasive work advocating for independence from Great Britain. Common Sense solidified Paine as one of the most important figures of the American Revolution. As Foner argues, Paine’s legacy stretches beyond the colonial era: “Common Sense announced a prophecy from which would spring the nineteenth-century idea of the United States as an empire of liberty” (15).

Thomas Jefferson was born in Virginia in 1743. He served as the first Secretary of State, in the Washington Administration, and served as vice president to John Adams before winning the presidency himself in 1800. Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the nation. His presidency is mostly associated with the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the land area of the United States but also forced the relocation of Native American tribes. Foner writes of Jefferson that he “owned over one hundred enslaved people at the time he wrote the immortal lines affirming the inalienable right to liberty, and everything he cherished in his own manner of life, from lavish entertainments to the leisure that made possible the pursuit of arts and sciences, ultimately rested on slave labor” (32).