AUTHOR: THOMAS PAINE
DATE: 1776
Published in January 1776 in Philadelphia, the largest city in the then American colony of Pennsylvania, Common Sense was a cutting forty-seven-page pamphlet raging against the inequities of royal rule. In a few short months, it became one of the drivers of the American War of Independence that saw the overthrow of British rule and the establishment of the United States of America. At a moment when many of those who decried British rule eschewed the idea of a complete break, Paine gave wings to that very idea.
Paine was born in the English county of Norfolk in 1737 and had left school when he was thirteen to help out at his father’s corset shop. When he was twenty, he briefly served as crew on a privateer, then had some unsuccessful attempts at starting his own business before finding work as a tax collector for the government – a job from which he was ultimately fired, and which left him with a low opinion of the British government.
With little going for him professionally, he decided to start anew in 1774 and so set out for America. In London, he had met Benjamin Franklin, one of the most influential Americans of the age, and persuaded him to furnish him with a letter of recommendation. As a result, when he arrived in Philadelphia, Paine was able to find work as a journalist, having earned himself a reputation back in Britain as a talented pamphleteer.
He found America simmering with discontent at the heavy hand of the British government – a position with which he had much sympathy. The Americans considered themselves to be over-taxed and shackled by British trade restrictions. The year before his arrival had seen the famous Boston Tea Party, when a tea shipment was cast into Boston harbour in protest against the favourable terms under which the British East India Company was permitted to operate, and because many of the colonists refused the idea of taxation by an administration in which they were not permitted representation.
There was a growing feeling that the Anglo-American relationship needed major revision. But fewer were convinced that a complete divorce was the answer. Then Paine published his pamphlet in the early part of January 1776, signing it only ‘by an Englishman’. Franklin and another of the ‘Founding Fathers’, Benjamin Rush, encouraged him in the project, and Paine duly took no prisoners.
Where others saved their fiercest criticism for the British government and parliament, Paine directed his complaints towards the monarch himself, George III. The idea of hereditary monarchy, he suggested, was utterly absurd, and Europe’s numerous failing monarchies provided ample evidence of it. Why should the colonist seek rapprochement with a regime intent on imposing unfair taxes and unjust laws? Hadn’t most of the colonists fled to escape all that in the first place anyway?
‘Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America,’ he wrote. ‘This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither they have fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.’ Time to break away, he contended: ‘We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ A world, for instance, where property ownership was not a prerequisite to having a vote or holding public office.
It was incendiary, certainly. Too much, even, for some of the most prominent of the American would-be revolutionaries. But Paine’s words quickly found a mass audience. The pamphlet is estimated to have sold over five hundred thousand copies during the course of the American War of Independence and found a much wider audience through black market reproductions and public readings in pubs and meeting halls.
Paine had wanted to call the work The Plain Truth but Rush persuaded him to go with Common Sense, judging that the title better reflected one of Paine’s major concerns: that ordinary people ought to trust their feelings rather than become immersed in abstract political debate. One could debate all day the rights and wrongs of breaking with the mother country, but why stay when that country mistreats you, he suggested. ‘Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.’ And now was the colonies’ moment, ‘that peculiar time, which never happens to a nation but once’.
Thomas Jefferson is said to have considered Paine the pre-eminent writer of Revolutionary America, a man who could find the voice and language to truly connect with a mass audience. The future second president of the USA, John Adams, was another who recognized his impact, writing to his wife in April 1776: ‘Common Sense, like a ray of revelation, has come in seasonably to clear our doubts, and to fix our choice.’ Nonetheless, Adams was also among those wary of the pamphlet’s arguments, some of which he addressed in his own tract of the same year, Thoughts on Government.
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
Paine would go on to author another major tract in 1791, Rights of Man, which argued in defence of another revolution – this time, the one then overtaking France. It was written in response to Edmund Burke’s attack on the revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France, written the previous year. The British government was concerned that Paine’s views would find an audience at home and so a writ was issued for his arrest in 1792. Having returned from America, Paine fled to France, becoming immersed in the fervid political scene there until he was arrested in Paris in late 1793, winning his freedom only after the intervention of an old American ally (and another future US president), James Monroe. Tried in absentia in Britain, he was convicted of seditious libel against Burke but avoided punishment by never returning to his native country.
Regardless of his detractors, Paine’s voice proved perhaps, in the moment, the most influential of the many competing to steer the direction of events at that pivotal time. The American colonies did make that break with the colonial power, just as he suggested. His writings achieved permanent impact as a formative influence on both the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As such, Paine stands as one of the great Enlightenment champions of civil and human rights.