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.
Its impact on all areas of colonial life would be difficult to exaggerate. “Whether intended or not, Paine had succeeded in outflanking the very body that was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the American colonists.” Founder Benjamin Rush, who suggested the title “Common Sense,” claimed it was “delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon by a clergyman in Connecticut.” Silas Deane—a commercial agent for Congress in France—said it “has a greater run, if possible, here than in America.”
How did Paine suddenly show up?
Members of the Continental Congress were not all rich, possessed of prestigious degrees, or lawyers. But many had established leadership skills and could generally be considered successful individuals. Paine had none of these attributes. In no sense could he be considered an elite. His life until late 1774 was a train of personal and occupational failures. So how did he become—in some 13 months—the American Revolution’s major catalyst?
We can get some idea of his sudden emergence from his character and three strong influences.
Paine was born in Thetford, England in January 1737 to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother. What made Thetford special—and his first influence—was its close proximity to an annual execution site called Gallows Hill. A bureaucrat with the title Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas traveled from Cambridge to Thetford each spring to conduct the executions. “His arrival in Paine’s hometown was bathed in pomp,” Keane writes, “above all because the Lord Chief Justice symbolized the power of George II’s government over outlying courts and regions.”
The accused had no say in their trials. They stood mute, awaiting their punishment. Most were accused of petty offenses. Of these, they were “ordered to be branded, put in the town pillory, publicly or privately whipped, or fined and imprisoned.” Criminal cases typically involved “ad hoc acts against property — that is, driven by material desperation and not by any widespread culture of criminality within the ranks of the poor.” The Lord Chief Justice would hang a beggar (never a gentleman) for stealing a bushel of wheat or purchasing a stolen horse. On Gallows Hill they were dressed in blue coats, made to listen to some prayers and hymns, then ordered to mount the scaffold before being hanged and left to dangle in public for a day. Paine witnessed this ritual for the first 19 years of his life.
During the next two decades Paine “relentlessly failed in everything personal and professional” he attempted, writes Craig Nelson in Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, including staymaker, taxman, grocer, teacher, and husband (twice), his last marriage ending in divorce.
Paine Meets Franklin
At this point, with nothing to lose, he decided to see what London had to offer, where he met some scientists and American diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Paine’s sharp wit and keen interest in science impressed Franklin, leading to the second key influence of his life when Franklin, on September 30, 1774, wrote a letter of recommendation for Paine to carry to his son-in-law Richard Bache (“Beech”) in Philadelphia: “If you can put him [Paine] in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school,” as a means of subsistence, you “much oblige your affectionate father.”
The only catch was Paine had to sail to Philadelphia first. As Nelson writes,
Traveling to the other side of the world meant facing the threats of marine storms, becalmings, icebergs, pilot error, and rotted food, not to mention state-sanctioned buccaneering.
At age 37, Paine had already surpassed his life expectancy of 36.6 years. What would drive him to board a ship when his likely future was so uninspiring and uncertain? Nevertheless, he did, and it almost killed him, as he wrote to Franklin later:
I had very little hope that the Captain or myself would live to see America. Dr. Kearsley of this place, attended the ship on her arrival, and when he understood that I was on your recommendation he provided a lodging for me, and sent two of his men with a chaise to bring me on shore, for I could not at that time turn in my bed without help.
After six weeks of bed rest in Kearsley’s home, Paine found other lodging and a job as editor of a new monthly periodical, The Pennsylvania Magazine. The city in which he now lived—with a population of 30,000—was the wealthiest and largest in America. His job as editor was to inform its readers, per the magazine’s owner Robert Aiken, not to create controversy, a rule Paine violated often.
The colonies were such a motley lot that “the entire continent teetered at the edge of civil war,” Nelson writes. The population was too heterogeneous a mix
…of class, religion, traditions, food, and beliefs [to expect them to] cohere into a unified nation. Though two-thirds of colonial America had come from one tiny island, and the vast majority of them from a very narrow socioeconomic range, they had, in every other way measurable, absolutely nothing in common.
Paine was too happy in America to let such things bother him, as he wrote in the magazine’s first issue, January 24, 1775:
America yet inherits a large portion of her first-imported virtue. Degeneracy is here almost a useless word. Those who are conversant with Europe would be tempted to believe that even the air of the Atlantic disagrees with the constitution of foreign vices; if they survive the voyage, they [the vices] either expire on their arrival, or linger away in an incurable consumption. There is a happy something in the climate of America, which disarms them of all their power both of infection and attraction. (emphasis added)
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.
P.S. For a researched account of Paine’s role in the Revolution, see my speculative screenplay, “Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution.” Or see my more reader-friendly book of the same name.