The Failure To Stop Thomas Paine
The United States, formerly these united colonies, is preparing for its 250th anniversary of its break-up from that era’s Great Satan by reminding us of what brought it about, such as the Battle of Lexington and Concord and subsequent battles of 1775, along with issues that preceded them. In spite of all the bloodshed and fiery tavern rhetoric, most members of the Continental Congress wanted reconciliation from Britain, not independence, even after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on January 10, 1776.
“Nobody whose voice counted within the American colonies,” writes John Keane in Tom Paine: A Political Life, “thought outside the existing terms of the British Empire.” At the same time, the colonists’ “fearless love of English liberties [made] them in spirit more English than the English.”
As Paine’s pamphlet “poured off the presses in a never-ending stream” during the spring and summer of 1776, it not only roused the rabble but swayed key military personnel such as George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, who described it as “working a wonderful change in the minds of many men” while pronouncing its reasoning “unanswerable” and converting him in full to independence.
By April 1776 Paine estimated that 120,000 copies of his pamphlet had already been published and was spreading far and wide. As Keane tells us,
Common Sense fueled the desire of some Virginia tobacco planters to repudiate their large debts to British merchants, fanned the ambitions of certain colonial leaders to boost their reputations by declaring the colonies independent, and fired the aspirations of some colonial merchants and producers to escape the trading restrictions imposed by British navigation acts.
Its impact on all areas of colonial life would be difficult to exaggerate. “Whether intended or not, Paine had succeeded in outflanking the very body that was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the American colonists.” Founder Benjamin Rush, who suggested the title “Common Sense,” claimed it was “delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon by a clergyman in Connecticut.” Silas Deane, a commercial agent for Congress in France, said it “has a greater run, if possible, here than in America.”
How did Paine suddenly show up?
Members of the Continental Congress were not all rich, possessed of prestigious degrees, or lawyers. But many had established leadership skills and could generally be considered successful individuals. Paine had none of these attributes. In no sense could he be considered an elite. His life until late 1774 was a train of personal and occupational failures. So how did he become, in some 13 months, the American Revolution’s major catalyst?
We can get some idea of his sudden emergence from his character and three strong influences.
Paine was born in Thetford, England on January 1737 to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother. What made Thetford special — and his first influence —
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