Common Sense Published
Thomas Paine's 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously in Philadelphia on 10 January 1776, sold an estimated 100,000 copies within three months and perhaps 500,000 over the course of the war — in a colonial population of roughly 2.5 million. Written in clear, accessible prose deliberately aimed at tradesmen and farmers rather than the educated elite, it made three arguments: that monarchy as a form of government was irrational and absurd on its face; that the British connection had never served American interests and was not worth defending; and that independence was not a last resort but an affirmative good — the opportunity to found a new kind of republic free of aristocracy and inherited privilege. Paine, an English immigrant who had arrived in Philadelphia only fourteen months earlier with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, brought to the colonial debate an outsider's clarity. The existing argument had been conducted almost entirely in the legal language of parliamentary rights, precedent, and constitutional claims against specific abuses; Paine reframed it as a moral and political question about self-governance itself. George Washington had the pamphlet read to his troops. Jefferson later acknowledged its influence on the Declaration of Independence's preamble. Common Sense did not create the independence movement, but it transformed the climate in which the Continental Congress's June 1776 votes on independence occurred.
- Year: 1776 CE
- Category: Social
