LA Learn Article 4

Laurel Anna Learn Article #4

Common Sense: The Little Book That Lit a Revolution

In the winter of 1776, a small pamphlet of about fifty pages went on sale in Philadelphia for two shillings. It carried no author’s name, only the words “written by an Englishman.” Within months it was being read aloud in taverns, churches, and around kitchen fires up and down the thirteen colonies, and it helped turn a quarrel over taxes into a revolution. The pamphlet was Common Sense. The Englishman was Thomas Paine.

[Figure 1: Portrait of Thomas Paine]

Thomas Paine (1737–1809). Oil portrait by Auguste Millière, after an engraving by William Sharp, after a lost 1792 painting by George Romney. National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 897).

Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Paine.jpg

A Rocky Start

Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737, in the small English market town of Thetford. (You may sometimes see February 9, 1737—the result of a calendar change Britain made during his lifetime.) His father, a Quaker, made “stays,” the stiffened cords used in ladies’ corsets; his mother was an Anglican from a more comfortable family. Young Thomas left school around age thirteen to learn his father’s trade and then spent the better part of twenty years failing at nearly everything he tried. He ran off to sea aboard a privateer. He made corset stays. He kept a shop that collapsed. He taught school. Twice he took jobs collecting taxes for the crown, and twice he was let go. His first wife died young; his second marriage ended in separation. By 1774, at thirty-seven, Paine was broke, jobless, and staring at the real possibility of debtors’ prison.

Then came a lucky break. While in London, Paine met Benjamin Franklin who was there representing the colonies. Franklin saw a spark in the struggling Englishman and handed him something priceless: letters of recommendation. Paine packed up what little he had and sailed for America.

A New Start in America

The voyage nearly killed Paine. He arrived in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774, so sick—probably with typhus—that he had to be carried off the ship. But Franklin’s letters opened doors, and within a few months Paine was editing the Pennsylvania Magazine. There he sharpened the gift that had been hiding beneath all those failures: he could write, plainly, powerfully, and in a way ordinary people understood.

As it would happen he arrived at exactly the right moment. The previous spring, fighting had broken out between colonists and British soldiers at Lexington and Concord. Many Americans were furious, yet most still hoped to patch things up with Britain. Paine thought patching things up was folly. He believed the colonies should break away from the crown entirely and govern themselves.

The Little Book That Roared

Encouraged by friends—the physician Dr. Benjamin Rush is usually credited with suggesting the title—Paine poured his argument into a pamphlet. Common Sense went on sale on January 10, 1776. He published it anonymously, and for good reason: openly calling for independence was treason.

Paine divided the pamphlet into four parts. The first questioned the very idea of government and poked holes in Britain’s celebrated constitution. The second argued that kings and “hereditary succession”—the notion that the right to rule passes down by blood—were absurd and even un-Biblical. The third declared that making peace with Britain was now a “fallacious dream,” because too much blood had already been spilled. The fourth insisted that America had the people, the timber, and the will to win its freedom—and to build a navy of its own.

What set Common Sense apart was not only what it said, but how it said it. Other writers stuffed their arguments with Latin phrases that only the educated could follow. Paine wrote for everyone. He assumed his readers knew their Bible, and he reached for vivid, everyday language. He branded King George III “the Royal Brute of Britain.” He argued that in a free country “the law is king,” not any man. Mocking inherited rule, he wrote that nature herself seemed to disapprove, “otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.” It was part sermon, part lawyer’s brief, and all of it fueled the spark into a fire for independence.

[Figure 2: Title page of “Common Sense,” 1776]

Title page of the first edition of Common Sense, printed by R. Bell in Philadelphia, 1776. Library of Congress (no known restrictions on publication).

Public domain. Source: https://www.loc.gov/item/2006681076/

Lighting the Fuse

The effect was electric. Colonists who had never dared say the word “independence” out loud suddenly found it printed plainly on the page—and it began to sound less like treason and more like, well, common sense.

The pamphlet reached the very top. General George Washington, then besieging the British in Boston, praised its “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning,” in January to a fellow officer and in April 1776 wrote that Common Sense was “working a powerful change…in the minds of many men.” Not everyone was so admiring. John Adams agreed that America should be independent, but he was alarmed by Paine’s simple plan of government—a single lawmaking body with no checks upon it. Adams thought that a recipe for “confusion,” and answered with his own pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, sketching the kind of balanced system that would later shape the U.S. Constitution. Long afterward, Adams is traditionally quoted as conceding that “without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Here is perhaps the most surprising part: Paine made almost nothing from the most famous pamphlet in American history. He gave up his rights to it so that it could be reprinted freely, and directed his share of any profits toward supplies for the Continental Army.

How Many Copies, Really?

You will often read that Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in three months, or even half a million in all—figures that would make it, relative to the population, one of the best-selling works in American history. The 120,000 figure traces back to Paine himself, who had every reason to make his influence sound enormous. The half-million figure came later, from his 1892 biographer Moncure Conway, who simply guessed that “in the end probably half a million copies were sold.”

Modern historians are skeptical. Almost no sales records survive, so no one truly knows the total. The scholar Trish Loughran argued the real number was far smaller—perhaps a few tens of thousands at most. What is not in doubt is that Common Sense was reprinted more often, and reached more colonists, than almost anything else published in America that century. Its real power lay less in any exact sales figure than in how completely it shifted the conversation, in the crucial six months before the colonies declared independence on July 4, 1776.

What Came Next

Paine did not stop. That December, during some of the war’s darkest days, he began The American Crisis, which opened with words Washington read aloud to his freezing troops before their daring victory at Trenton: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

[Figure 3: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 1851]

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze (1851), Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paine’s words from The American Crisis were read to the troops before the victory at Trenton.

Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware_by_Emanuel_Leutze,_MMA-NYC,_1851.jpg

After the war, Paine returned to Europe and was swept into the French Revolution. His book The Rights of Man (1791–92) defended that revolution so boldly that it was banned in Britain, where he was convicted of “seditious libel” without even being present. In France he was elected to the National Convention—though he spoke no French—and was thrown in prison when he opposed executing the king. He narrowly escaped the guillotine.

In prison he wrote much of The Age of Reason, which set out his belief in God through reason rather than through churches or the literal words of the Bible. The book made him famous in a new and painful way: many former admirers now branded him an enemy of religion. He also wrote Agrarian Justice, proposing a tax on inherited land to fund payments to the elderly and to every young person just starting out—ideas so far ahead of their time that today’s U.S. Social Security Administration recognizes them as an early call for old-age pensions.

When Paine returned to America in 1802, he found his reputation in ruins. His religious views, and a bitter public letter he had written attacking George Washington, had cost him most of his friends. He died in New York City on June 8, 1809. By tradition, only a handful of mourners—perhaps six—stood at his grave.

Facts of Note:

• His bones went missing. In 1819 an English admirer dug up Paine’s remains to give him a grand reburial in England. The monument was never built, the bones were lost, and they have never been found. Over the years, people have claimed to own his skull, his hair, even a piece of his brain.

• He was an inventor. Paine patented a design for a single-span iron bridge and tinkered with everything from a smokeless candle to early engine ideas.

• He gave us famous phrases. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” “the rights of man,” and “the age of reason” all came from his pen—and some credit him with helping popularize the very name “The United States of America.”

Why It Mattered

Thomas Paine never held high office, never grew rich, and died nearly friendless. Yet the plain words of one failed corset-maker did what armies could not: they helped a disgruntled but hesitant people imagine themselves as a free nation. In the months when America hung between obedience and rebellion, Common Sense tipped the balance and proved that sometimes the mightiest weapon of all is a pen.

Definitions and Phrases:

Linonia: A literary and debating society at Yale College, founded September 12, 1753. It is the oldest surviving society of its kind at Yale (its short-lived predecessor, Crotonia, came first but didn't last). Membership was open to all undergraduates, and it gave students a forum for debate, oratory, essays, and staged plays, alongside a rival society, Brothers in Unity, founded in 1768. Its motto was Amicitia Concordia Soli Noscimus ("we alone learn in friendship and harmony"). Both societies built large private libraries that they eventually donated to Yale's college library in 1871.

Kith and Kin: An English idiom meaning "friends and relatives." It dates to Middle English (14th century). Kin meant family; kith came from Old English cythth ("knowledge" or "acquaintance") and originally meant one's country, or one's familiar friends and neighbors.

Livy: A Roman historian (Titus Livius, 59 BC – AD 17), author of Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City"), a 142-book history of Rome running from its legendary origins through Livy's own lifetime. Only 35 books survive today. He wrote decades after the events of Rome's early history and drew heavily on oral tradition and earlier (often lost) Roman writers, which is why modern historians treat his accounts of Rome's founding era as legend shaped for moral and patriotic effect rather than verified fact.

Brutus: (Lucius Junius Brutus) A semi-legendary Roman noble credited with leading the overthrow of Rome's last king, the tyrannical Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, around 509 BC.

Cloelia: A legendary young Roman noblewoman who, according to the historian Livy, was among a group of hostages Rome handed over to the Etruscan king Lars Porsena as part of a peace settlement in the late 6th century BC. Cloelia is said to have escaped the Etruscan camp and led a group of fellow hostages in swimming across the Tiber River back to Roman territory and under a hail of arrows no less. Porsena was reportedly so impressed by her courage that, after briefly demanding her return, he let her go free and allowed her to choose other hostages to release with her. Rome later honored her with an equestrian statue on the Via Sacra, which was an unusual tribute for a woman in Roman commemorative art.

Porsenna’s camp: Lars Porsena was an Etruscan king of the city of Clusium who, according to Roman tradition, led an army against Rome around 508–509 BC after Rome expelled its last king. Porsena's forces besieged the city, and his camp outside Rome is where hostages exchanged under the eventual peace treaty were held. The siege is the setting for several of Rome's best-known founding legends, including a Roman defender single-handedly holding a bridge against Porsena's army and a young Roman burning his own hand before the king to prove Roman resolve.

Cincinnatus: (Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus) A Roman patrician and statesman, consul in 460 BC, who became the ancient world's model of civic virtue. According to tradition, in 458 BC — while personally working a small farm he was appointed dictator (a temporary emergency office with near-absolute power) to rescue a Roman army that enemy forces had trapped in the field. He won the campaign within about two weeks and immediately gave up his power to return to farming, rather than holding onto it.

Mount Algidus: A ridge in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome, in territory dispute. It was the site of a 458 BC battle in which a Roman army was surrounded by the Aequi before being rescued by a relief force under an emergency Roman commander.

Tiber: A river in central Italy, roughly 252 miles long, flowing from the Apennine Mountains through the city of Rome to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was central to Rome's founding and growth, providing water, trade access to the sea, and a natural boundary and defense line, and it figures in numerous Roman legends.

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