Thomas Paine was born in England in 1737. He attended the competitive Thetford Grammar School and, like any student of that time, studied Latin and rhetoric together with mathematics. At age thirteen he began to work in the family business of corset making (a fact that was later used against him in British political cartoons), but he was not successful at it. Beginning in 1761 Paine worked in a number of civil service jobs, mostly as an excise officer, collecting taxes on manufactured goods. This work also proved unsteady, and he had to supplement his income by working in other professions— as a privateer (a crewman on a ship granted the right by the British government to attack and confiscate the merchant shipping of enemy nations), as a schoolteacher, and as the manager of a tobacco shop. He succeeded in none of these ventures and in 1774 declared bankruptcy. His first venture into political propaganda was a pamphlet he sent to members of parliament titled The Case of the Officers of Excise, arguing for improved working conditions for that class of civil servants. This apparently had little effect at the time. A few weeks after his bankruptcy, Paine met the American statesman Benjamin Franklin in London. Paine impressed him enough that Franklin wrote letters of introduction on Paine’s behalf to contacts in Philadelphia, and Paine immigrated to America, arriving on November 30, 1774.