Making Connections Thomas Paine and Charles Cist.

I know that Thomas Paine and Charles Cist worked together in Philadelphia through the printing of Common Sense. I am reading Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, by Harvey J. Kaye. Mr. Kaye's novel describes Paine's early adulthood while living in London, England and the Sussex coast. On pages 26-40 Kaye illustrates the chronicle  movements of Paine arriving to America and how he arrived and when he arrived. Paine petitioned the Excise Commission in London for career opportunities and there he networked with the City's intellectuals and met the writer and scientist and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin. This is a connection because it shows the same time period that Cist made he escape through Europe to America. It also shows the networking by Benjamin Franklin and others traveling back and forth from America to England and France and elsewhere meeting, well- educated, young individuals to come to America.

Additionally, Paine was not the publisher of North Briton, but he did witness the publisher, John Wilkes, go through a public display of "Wilkes and Liberty" in the streets against the control of government and taxes. It illustrated an example of government menacing in rights of freeborn Englishmen. He took this experience with him to the British Colonies when he left England in the late summer of 1774.
Benjamin Franklin gave Paine an introduction letter to show Franklin's son-in-law, Richard Bache, an insurance underwriter in Philadelphia and to Franklin's son, William. William was Royal Governor of New Jersey. The introduction letter read:
The bearer, Mr. Thomas Paine, is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man...If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor ( of all of which I think him very capable) so that he may procure a subsistence at least, til he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country you will do well and much oblige your affectionate father.
Paine had networking opportunities and platforms to springboard his political ambitions.

Could this have happened to Charles Cist? Did Cist receive a letter of introduction from someone in America while in Europe? Was it Benjamin Franklin? Cist landed in Philadelphia during the same time period.  He married Mary Weiss the daughter of Jacob Weiss who was under the command of George Washington. This shows a similar networking of the same social connections.

On page 29, Mr. Kaye mentions that the British Colonies had swelled to over three million people. The wave of immigrants from Scots, Scots-Irish, Welsh, Germans, Dutch, French, Swedes, and enslaved Africans made America even more diverse. The" news" was out all over Europe "Come to America."

Charles Cist spoke many languages and with all of these new immigrants arriving in the British Colonies, he, too, was involved in a network to come to America. Cist could not have done all this traveling from Siberia, Russia to America on his own.
Andrew C. Allen


Paine arrived in Philadelphia a free man, but the ship travel was very difficult, many people died on the journey over. Paine quickly was offered a journalism/ editorship job at The Pennsylvania Magazine  owned by Robert Aitken. Under Paine's editorship subscriptions rose from 600 to 1500 subscribers, but Paine was not happy working for Mr. Aitken and Mr. Witherspoon. He quit in summer of 1775.

Is there a connection between the break up of the printing partnership of Cist and Styner  and Paine leaving the editorship of The Pennsylvania Magazine? Cist continued to print pamphlets. This has been added to the list of questions I have at home.
Andrew C. Allen
1841 West Main Street, #212
Troy, OH  45373
pewabic34 at gmail.com
12/10/2015