The Provocation That Helped Create America

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Thomas Paine may have exaggerated when he said his pamphlet Common Sense was the most successful publication “since the invention of printing,” but only by a little. Published 250 years ago last week, Common Sense is perhaps the most consequential piece of political writing in American history. At a moment when hostilities with Britain had already commenced but many still entertained hopes of reconciliation, it made a forceful and seemingly irrefutable argument for independence. As the Atlantic writer Frederick Sheldon wrote in an 1859 portrait of Paine, many Americans “stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon” at the beginning of 1776. Common Sense helped them cross it.

Reading it now, Paine’s words are a kind of portal back to the Revolutionary moment. Although Common Sense is an 18th-century text with 18th-century language and preoccupations, a live current still runs through it. To revisit what Paine captured as a turning point in human history is to be reminded of the most expansive possibilities of the American idea at its creation.

Paine was an unlikely spokesman for American independence. When he wrote Common Sense, he’d only recently arrived in America from England. He was 37, and mostly a failure after turns as a staymaker (an artisan who made corsets), teacher, shopkeeper, and tax collector. The two things Paine was best at—talking and writing—had at least landed him in useful company in London, and he’d left for Philadelphia late in 1774 bearing a letter of introduction from no less a patron than Benjamin Franklin. Not long after his arrival, Paine began editing the weekly Pennsylvania Magazine, taking on the horrors of slavery, the unwelcome presence of British troops, the prospects of defensive war, and the trials of marriage (another venture in which he had failed).

With Common Sense, Paine, in the words of the American general Charles Lee, “burst upon the world like Jove, in thunder.” First issued on January 10, 1776, it was printed up and down the colonies in some 25 editions over the course of the year. Paine would later claim that it sold 150,000 copies, making it the best-selling “performance” since “the use of letters.” Whatever the figures, if Common Sense didn’t single-handedly convert Americans to independence, it gave words to growing feelings. As a Massachusetts man wrote to Paine, “every sentiment has sunk into my well-prepared heart.”

It did not do so by accident. Paine crafted Common Sense as a kind of talking book; its pages are alive with the voices and scenes of the Revolutionary moment. John Adams complained that Common Sense sounded like it was written by a former inmate of London’s notorious Newgate Prison, “or one who had chiefly associated with such company.” For Paine, this was high praise. He wished for Common Sense to sound like what one might hear in the tavern, the shop, the coffeehouse, or the street. Anticipating public readings, he fashioned the text as something of a script, adding italics and capitals to direct its performers to catch its cadences and hurl its barbs: “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART.”

Paine’s argument for parting was as powerful as his language. His reasoning began with an indictment of the whole institution of monarchy (which he called “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.”) What monarchy’s devotees claimed as natural and divine, Paine described as a crime of history. The first king? He was the “chief among plunderers” and “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” Such rhetoric announced a marked turn in the discourse on America’s relation to Britain, both in tone and target. Previously, the debate involved the abstract language of political theory and had largely focused on the question of Parliament’s authority over the colonies. Paine’s anti-monarchy appeal at once simplified the case and made it more democratic, shaking the foundations of a world defined by rigid hierarchies.

For even some American leaders, such ideas were dangerously subversive. Adams, who recognized Paine’s genius but feared his book’s influence, called Paine a “disastrous meteor” whose appearance portended disorder and tumult. Paine wasn’t merely making a case against monarchy and for American independence—he was offering a thrilling vision of America as a refuge for liberty and equality, a laboratory for self-government, independent not just from Britain but from all the existing institutions that kept people in their places. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he announced. “The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

This year, the 250th birthday of the nation Paine helped write into existence is at hand. But with a leader who yearns for the powers of a king and an administration working to discount the currency of our most Revolutionary ideals, we seem to be reverting to the old world Paine wished to bury. His pamphlet, a provocation then, is perhaps the provocation we need now. It remains true that “men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent.” It is not theoretical that some figure “laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” And as freedom is being “hunted around the globe,” we would do well to remember that America was born, in aspiration at least, as a home for the fugitive and “an asylum for mankind.”