The United States, formerly these united colonies, is preparing for its 250th anniversary of its break-up from that era’s “Great Satan” by reminding us of what brought it about, such as the Battle of Lexington and Concord and subsequent battles of 1775, along with issues that preceded them. In spite of all the bloodshed and fiery tavern rhetoric, most members of the Continental Congress wanted reconciliation from Britain, not independence, even after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on January 10, 1776.
“Nobody whose voice counted within the American colonies,” writes John Keane in Tom Paine: A Political Life, “thought outside the existing terms of the British Empire.” At the same time, the colonists’ “fearless love of English liberties [made] them in spirit more English than the English.”
As Paine’s pamphlet “poured off the presses in a never-ending stream” during the spring and summer of 1776, it not only roused the rabble but swayed key military personnel such as George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, who described it as “working a wonderful change in the minds of many men” while pronouncing its reasoning “unanswerable” and converting him in full to independence.
By April 1776, Paine estimated that 120,000 copies of his pamphlet had already been published and were spreading far and wide. As Keane tells us,
Common Sense fueled the desire of some Virginia tobacco planters to repudiate their large debts to British merchants, fanned the ambitions of certain colonial leaders to boost their reputations by declaring the colonies independent, and fired the aspirations of some colonial merchants and producers to escape the trading restrictions imposed by British navigation acts. …
Further on, he mentioned that wit, “though it attacks with more subtlety than science, has often defeated a whole regiment of heavy artillery.”
It turned out that many of the motley mix did have something in common—a love of liberty and a hatred of arbitrary authority. ”With a high rate of literacy in the colonies,” writes Jack Fruchtman, Jr., in Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, “even the artisans and craftsmen read the newspapers and pamphlets of the day,” thus providing Paine an eager audience.
Paine’s skillful writing brought the motley mix together when Benjamin Rush encouraged him to write a pamphlet. According to Rush’s “not entirely accurate memoirs,” Nelson asserts, “[Paine] readily assented to the proposal, and from time to time he called at my house, and read to me every chapter of the proposed pamphlet as he composed it.”
Common Sense had many influences, but the words were Paine’s alone. No member of Congress, not even Sam Adams, had the audacity to say that kings originally were “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”
It is such bold, direct language that won the day then and serves to sustain us now.
Paine was the OG revolutionary propagandist!! Without Paine, the English colonist would have remained the English colonists and never become independent American citizens. He was the direct cause of the ire of the general population being raised against the king of England. He roused about one-third of the population enough to take on the formidable English army, although the British had generally roused them before by transporting them for petty isht or even hanging them. Why wouldn’t a good portion of the English slaves indentured servants want to be free in the first place? Isn’t that a good enough reason to revolt?