Common Sense Published
Thomas Paine published a forty-eight page pamphlet in January 1776 and it sold perhaps 150,000 copies in a country of two and a half million. He had arrived in Philadelphia fourteen months earlier, aged thirty-seven, after failing as a corset-maker, a privateer, a schoolmaster and an excise officer, with a letter of introduction from Franklin describing him as an ingenious worthy young man. What Common Sense did was change the question. The colonial argument until then had been legal and constitutional — the rights of Englishmen, the powers of Parliament, the distinction between internal and external taxes — and had always assumed the king as the protector against a corrupt legislature. Paine attacked the monarchy itself as an institution, ridiculed hereditary succession as an insult to posterity, called George III the royal brute, and argued that an island could not permanently govern a continent and that reconciliation was a delusion. The style is the other half of it. He wrote for men who read newspapers rather than law reports, in short declarative sentences with biblical rather than classical illustrations, and refused the Latin tags that every other pamphlet carried. He took no profit and assigned the royalties to the Continental Army for mittens. Washington had it read to the troops. The Declaration followed six months later, and its charges are largely against the king, which is Paine's framing rather than the framing of 1774. Paine went on to write for the French Revolution, was imprisoned by it, narrowly escaped the guillotine through a chalk mark on the wrong side of a door, and died in New York in 1809 with six people at his funeral. His remains were dug up by an admirer and lost.
- Year: 1776 CE
- Category: Social
