On this day in history, January 10, 1776, Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine, was published anonymously due to its subversive nature during the American Revolution. It became an overnight success and the best-selling book in American history.
The 46-page pamphlet, which was signed "written by an Englishman," went through 25 editions and sold 500,000 copies in 1776. Paine employed biblical references to make his case and structured it like a sermon.
He presented Americans with a declaration of independence from British rule at a time when the issue of freedom was still unresolved. The author linked the radical concept with dissenting Protestant beliefs as a way to create a new American political identity.
Arguments Against British Rule
Paine began writing Common Sense in 1775 and made seven main points: America was not a British nation, but was populated by people from all Europe, and it was illogical for an island to rule a continent. Furthermore, even if Britain were the mother country, this made her actions worse because no mother would so harm her children.
Remaining part of Britain would drag America into European wars and preclude it from international commerce. Distance also made governing the colonies from England difficult; it often took a year before the people got a response from Parliament.
In addition, the New World was discovered before the Reformation, with the Puritans believing that God intended to give them a safe haven from persecution. Britain ruled America for her own benefit and never considered the best interests of the colonists.
"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."
“Common Sense” Read in Public
Common Sense was popular because Paine avoided the use of complex, formal Latin phrases and used a more direct, plain style that made his ideas understandable to a broad audience, creating a new language that was read aloud at public meetings, and thus brought ordinary, illiterate Americans into the political debate.
Most people praised Paine's pamphlet. His views knocked most colonists off the fence and into the fight for freedom, the American Revolutionary War. But some colonists still favored reconciliation with the king. John Adams disagreed with Paine’s radical democracy: that men who did not own property should vote and hold public office.
He wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” But Adams also later admitted: “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”
“Times that Try Men's Souls”
Born in England in 1737, Paine had been a corset maker and a tax collector before he moved to Philadelphia in 1774 and became a journalist, sponsored by Ben Franklin. After writing Common Sense, while a soldier in the revolutionary army, he penned The American Crisis (1776-83).
Aiming to inspire the patriots in their battles against the Redcoats, the first of this series of eloquent pamphlets began with the famous lines, written on December 23, 1776, at the darkest moment of the war, with General George Washington’s Continental Army continuing to retreat: “These are the times that try men's souls.
“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
“The Rights of Man”
Paine lived in France in the 1790s and became involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a defense of the revolution against its critics, such as Edmund Burke, who wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790.
Paine was elected to the French National Convention in 1792, helped draft the new constitution, was arrested and imprisoned in 1793, narrowly escaped execution by guillotine during the Reign of Terror, and then was released in 1794.
Though born into a humble Quaker family, he became infamous because his next book, The Age of Reason (1793–94), advocated deism and secularism, reason and freethinking, and decried organized religion and most of the doctrines of Christianity.
“I believe in one God," he wrote, “and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.”
Paine also wrote Agrarian Justice (1795), which advocated a guaranteed minimum income. ”The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye,” he wrote, “is like dead and living bodies chained together.”
“Unequivocal Call for Revolution”
In 1802, Paine returned to America, where he died at age 72 in New York City on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral due to his rejection of religion. New York State had awarded him a 300-acre farm in New Rochelle; his body was brought there, but no church would receive it for interment, so he was buried under a walnut tree.
Ten years later, most of Paine’s body was dug up without permission and taken to London for a memorial. But it never materialized, and so his boxed bones were eventually sold off, bit by bit, to scores of his admirers around the world.
He had donated his royalties from Common Sense to the Continental Army, explaining, “As my wish was to serve an oppressed people, and assist in a just and good cause, I conceived that the honor of it would be promoted by my declining to make even the usual profits of an author.”
At a time when many Americans wavered between peaceful reconciliation and independence from Britain, Common Sense was welcomed as “an unequivocal call for revolution” that assailed monarchy as an institution and blamed the king -- who Paine called the “crowned ruffian” and “a royal brute” -- for the suffering of the colonies.
“To Begin the World Over Again”
In his History of the American Revolution, British historian George Trevelyan wrote: “It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting . . . It was pirated, parodied and imitated, and translated into the language of every country where the new republic had well-wishers. It worked nothing short of miracles and turned Tories into Whigs.”
Paine had made a convincing case for American independence by promoting a complete break with history. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he wrote. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
With the success of the world’s first anticolonial revolution, the United States of America, a new nation, emerged. In a final Crisis installment on April 19, 1783, Paine concluded: “The times that tried men’s souls are over -- and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew gloriously and happily accomplished.”
SOURCES:
Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. 1976.
Keane, John. Tom Paine, A Political Life. 1995.
Liell, Scott. 46 Pages: Tom Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to American Independence. 2003.
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