PAINE ARRIVED IN PHILADELPHIA at its colonial apex. In coming decades, as the American population pushed farther west, the advantages afforded by Philadelphia’s vast hinterlands began to decline. Much of the prime farmland adjoining the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna Rivers had been claimed, and migrants were making their way to the Allegheny and Ohio River valleys. Meanwhile, the colonial commerce that had moved from the hinterlands of the middle colonies to the Philadelphia waterfront was beginning to flow to another, newer city.
Well before Paine’s arrival, Philadelphians had recognized that however advantageous the city’s geographic circumstances, however inventive its artisans and merchants, and however progressive its civic leaders, the city’s commercial primacy was uncertain. Farmers, fur traders, and ironworkers along the Susquehanna River had begun taking their produce to a fledgling commercial town to the south. In 1759, a Swedish visitor to Lancaster County observed that the pig iron produced in the region’s foundries was not sold in Philadelphia’s markets, but was “carried to the Susquehanna River, thence to Maryland, and finally to England.”1 By the early 1770s, this commerce transformed Baltimore Town from a tiny hamlet, smaller even than Annapolis, into the largest town in Maryland. In 1770 its population was still only 6000, just more than half that of Charleston and about two-thirds that of Newport. But its boom had begun. By 1800, Baltimore would be America’s fastest growing city. Ten years later, it would be the third largest city in the country with a population of 46,000; only Philadelphia and New York were larger.2
The reason for Baltimore’s early growth was transportation. As Pennsylvanians had long known, there was no easy path from the Susquehanna and its basin to Philadelphia. Backcountry producers on the river’s east side could ship goods overland. But as one observer wrote, Pennsylvania’s roads were often “rendered almost impassible by the multitude of carriages which use it.” Farmers on the western side of the Susquehanna faced the added challenge of a dangerous and costly crossing of the region’s largest river. In the face of such barriers, it was no wonder that “Baltimore town, in Maryland, has within a few years past carried off from [Philadelphia], almost the whole of the trade of Frederick [in Maryland], York, Bedford, and Cumberland counties,” all west of the Susquehanna. For western Pennsylvanians, in other words, it was simply cheaper and faster to move goods south, along the Susquehanna to Chesapeake Bay and the new port of Baltimore.
In 1771, four years before the Revolutionary War erupted outside of Boston, Samuel Rhoads, a Pennsylvania assemblyman and home builder, explained the problem to Franklin, his most famous client: “The growing Trade of Baltimore Town in Maryland drawn principally from our Province west of Susquehanna begins to alarm us with serious Apprehension of such a Rival as may reduce us to the Situation of Burlington [New Jersey] or New Castle on Delaware.” To avoid becoming a second-tier town, Philadelphia would have to draw westerners to its markets. A canal linking the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers was the most obvious way to do this. Whether or not such a colossal undertaking was at all possible was another matter. For some time, Philadelphia’s merchants had been exploring the idea and in 1769 they put the canal question to colonial America’s foremost scientific society.3
The American Philosophical Society, begun in the early 1740s by Franklin, the Pennsylvania farmer and botanist John Bartram, and the physician Thomas Bond, found new life in the decade before the Revolutionary War. As relations with Britain deteriorated, and Americans began confronting life without British manufactured goods, the society’s original mission of “Promoting Useful Knowledge” acquired a new urgency. Since many of the society’s leading members were Philadelphians, closely connected to the city’s merchant community, it took a leading role in the canal project. Here was science in the service of Philadelphia’s commercial empire.
In its preliminary studies, the society concluded that a new artificial water route would require the excavation of several hundred thousand cubic yards of dirt at a cost of between $900,000 and $3.6 million (in today’s dollars). The variation in cost reflected uncertainty over whether the canal ought to accommodate small, flat-bottomed barges, or deeper-keeled sailing vessels, capable of carrying more goods, and doing so in the open waters of the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. The latter would require the construction of stone locks and a canal deep enough to accommodate the ships’ deep drafts. Barges could simply be hauled from shore up and down the shoals and rapids that would inevitably form in a shallow canal.
But barges carried additional costs, unrelated to the construction of the canal. For goods to be moved from the canal’s mouth out into Delaware Bay, and up the river to Philadelphia, they would have to be transferred to more stable, seaworthy craft. Warehouses and wharves would have to be built to accommodate this transfer of goods. Low-wage stevedores would have to carry the goods from barge to ship. With many of those very same workers demanding better wages and greater political participation in exchange for their cooperation with colonial anti-importation agreements, militia musters, and other acts of resistance to British authority, the gentlemen of the Philosophical Society surely reckoned this a high cost.
And then there was the Susquehanna itself. The farther south one traveled, the more difficult it was to navigate, especially in the drier summer and fall months, when the Bald Friar Falls just south of the Pennsylvania border emerged out of the river’s rocky bottom. Any of the southerly locations of the canal would involve the additional construction of a safe watercourse through these falls. Another site that seemed to accommodate a relatively short and lower-cost canal was found likely to “carry all the navigation of the river Susquehanna . . . [too] far down the Chesapeake Bay, for an advantageous communication with Philadelphia.”
These problems were sufficiently vexing that some Philadelphians began exploring alternative canal routes. To Samuel Rhoads, the solution to the Baltimore problem was a northern route, linking the “Susquehanna to Schuylkill . . . so far as they lead towards our Capital City” of Philadelphia. These would all have been enormous and costly undertakings. In the face of economic disruption caused by the ongoing political struggle with the mother country, there is little reason to think that Philadelphians could have made them a reality. But the elaborate exploration and planning suggests a business community firmly convinced that its commercial well-being depended on ambitious internal improvement.4
BY THE TIME Paine arrived in the fall of 1774, Philadelphia’s long-term commercial prospects had drifted from the minds of its citizens. Now the preoccupation was more immediate. A Parliament beholden to special interests and a monarch oblivious to the deceptions of his ministers appeared bent on transforming colonists from tolerant, liberty-loving Englishmen into beleaguered servants of a grasping, greedy empire. The burning question now was not whether Philadelphia would continue to prosper, but whether it would continue to be part of imperial Britain.
For their brethren in Massachusetts, the eruption of open warfare on Lexington Green in April of 1775 would answer that question. Bostonians, who had already endured a lengthy British military occupation, had little doubt that Britain would use any means to subdue its colonies. For many, Lexington confirmed that independence was now the only viable path. There was no reconciling with a king prepared to turn his army against his own subjects.
In Philadelphia, sympathy for the Bostonians was widespread, but the march to independence was slower. There had been no occupying British army to unify public opinion against the King, and patriot voices struggled to be heard over the din of long-standing political divisions. The city’s merchant elite often clashed with its artisans and shopkeepers over issues of trade and taxation. Moderate Quakers and Anglicans had long fought with evangelical Presbyterians; English-speaking colonists questioned the loyalties of Pennsylvania’s German speakers. Across all these fissures lay the long simmering conflict between supporters of the colony’s proprietors, the Penn family, and their opponents, led by Benjamin Franklin.
After war erupted near Boston, the tide began to turn. Franklin, just returned from England, gave the more radical anti-British partisans a powerful new ally. Meanwhile, the British did their part to encourage colonial resistance. The burning of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill in mid-June of 1775 were followed by a series of failed colonial efforts at reconciliation. The best known of these was the so-called Olive Branch Petition initiated by John Dickinson, a member of Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Continental Congress, the ad hoc body that colonists had initially created to coordinate their response to British taxation but which was now overseeing the war effort. Dickinson was also a leader of the moderate wing of the patriot cause. He and his allies hoped the petition would persuade the King to end the war and negotiate a political settlement with the Americans. But the gesture only produced more British truculence.
On August 23, 1775, George III formally proclaimed the American colonies in open rebellion. Any of his subjects found to be aiding the American rebels would now be tried for treason. The news took several months to reach the colonies, but when it did in early November, it confirmed what radicals had long believed. The problem with Britain was not confined to a group of rogue ministers and a Parliament run amok. The problem was with the monarchy itself. Moderation, it seemed, was heading for extinction. The King’s proclamation “has a most happy effect,” observed Samuel Ward, a Rhode Island delegate to the Continental Congress, because “those who hoped for Redress from our Petitions now give them up & heartily join with us in carrying on the War vigorously.”5
FOR MOST OF HIS first year in America, Paine wrote very little about the revolutionary crisis. But as events drove more Philadelphians to the side of resistance and even independence, Paine began to speak out. And he began to say something many had come to believe, but few dared write. The only reasonable way to preserve American rights and liberties was independence.
In October 1775, just before word arrived of King George’s incendiary proclamation, in a brief newspaper essay innocuously entitled “A Serious Thought,” Paine offered his first public pronouncement on American independence. In the resonant, clear-eyed language for which he would become well-known, he reminded his readers that their recent problems were but the tip of an iceberg—an iceberg whose subsurface cruelties stretched from America to India. Under the guise of the quasi-private British East India Company, Britain’s India policies produced famine and bloodshed, the latter in the form of murderous rampages against Indians who refused to fight the company’s battles. In Africa, meanwhile, the company’s merchants carried on a barbaric trade whose destructive consequences were inescapable, even for those in far-off America. Britain’s evils were so extensive and insidious, there was but one path for right-thinking Americans:
When I reflect on the horrid cruelties exercised by Britain in the East Indies—How many thousands perished by artificial famine. . . . When I read of the wretched natives being blown away, for no other crime than because . . . they refused to fight—When I reflect on this and a thousand instances of similar barbarity. . . . —And when to these and many other melancholy reflections I add this sad remark, that ever since the discovery of America she has employed herself in the most horrid of all traffics, that of human flesh unknown to the most savage nations, has yearly (without provocation and in cold blood) ravaged the hapless shores of Africa, robbing it of its unoffending inhabitants to cultivate her stolen dominions in the West—When I reflect on these, I hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain. Call it independence or what you will, if it is the cause of God and humanity it will go on.6
As long as they remained subjects of the King of England, no Philadelphian would be spared the taint of Britain and its empire.
IN LATE 1775, AS the December freeze descended and the costs of months of warfare piled up, many of Paine’s fellow Philadelphians remained unable or unwilling to grasp this logic. For some, the problem was the old one of economics. Without British trade, American business would suffer. But for others, the concerns were more far-reaching. To separate from the United Kingdom was to challenge the political wisdom of centuries. Many of the most astute political minds of the day considered hereditary monarchy the only way to political stability. A country without a king was like a roof without walls: it was doomed to collapse. Lacking the unity imposed by the British crown, the American people might quarrel among themselves and descend into civil war. Lacking royal naval or military protection, they would be vulnerable to Britain’s French and Spanish rivals, never mind the great military might of Britain itself. Former colonies lacking a true head of state would also be unlikely to gain membership in an international community of monarchical nations.
Such fears were widespread in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, which ordered the colony’s Continental Congress delegation to oppose any move formally to sever ties with Britain. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s delegation continued to support the war effort. For the ever-diminishing number of moderates, there was no contradiction here. They hoped that the burdensome costs of war would soon lead the King and Parliament to the negotiating table. Even after the rejection of the Olive Branch Petition, and subsequent indications that the King was preparing to expand the military campaign, moderates maintained their opposition to independence.
For Paine and other radicals, including the famous Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress, Samuel Adams and his young cousin John, the persistence of moderation was inexplicable and infuriating. They saw no sign that the British government would reconcile on terms other than its own. Meanwhile, as the war continued, Congress was forced to consider some kind of military alliance, most likely with France, the only power whose military resources could begin to rival Britain’s. But the French were reluctant to support the Americans as long as reconciliation with Britain remained a possibility. It all made for a classic political stalemate—radicals saw independence as vital to military success while the moderates saw in independence a road to ruin. Further complicating matters, as it became a war-making body, in November 1775, the Continental Congress imposed new secrecy rules. The most influential politicians in the colonies were now forced to adopt a stately reticence. The business of Congress could no longer figure in the debate over independence.
Proponents of independence had to find a new way to bring their case to the public. This need stirred Philadelphia’s leading radical voice, Benjamin Rush, a physician, professor of chemistry, and antislavery activist, to enlist Paine, whom Rush had met through Aitken, and who had shown himself ideally suited to make that case. “I perceived with pleasure,” Rush recalled of their conversations, that Paine “had realized the independence of the American Colonies upon Great Britain” was now the only certain way “to bring the war to a speedy and successful issue.” Rush remembered suggesting to Paine that he make the case in print. The doctor would have done so himself, but he “shuddered at the prospect of its not being well received.” As an evangelical Presbyterian, Rush was unlikely to sway old-guard Anglicans, let alone Philadelphia’s many pacifist Quakers.
Rush also had a career to protect. His work as professor and physician demanded a reputation unsullied by political controversy. The Reverend William Smith, president of the College of Philadelphia, where Rush was professor of chemistry, had been a leader among the moderates, and the “great majority” of Philadelphians, some of whom were Rush’s patients, “were hostile to a separation of our country from Great Britain.” Paine, in contrast, had no reputation to protect. He was new to the country, had no family in America, and was unknown outside of Philadelphia. As Rush put it, “he could live anywhere.”7
In late 1775, Paine thus composed a bold call for American independence entitled Plain Truth. At Rush’s urging, he changed the title to Common Sense. The pamphlet contained no arcane legal argument; no dry political theory. In the simplest of terms, often drawing on the Bible, the one text all its readers knew, Common Sense justified the independence Paine and his allies had come to see as inevitable. Much of that justification came as a searing critique of the British mode of governance, particularly its hereditary monarch. The idea that birth alone entitled a human being to rule was, Paine proclaimed, among history’s greatest humbugs. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” he wrote, “is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” The routine incompetence of the likes of George III was proof enough that no natural order would ever sanction governance as a right of birth.8
AS HE TURNED his attention from magazine editing to politics, Paine’s relationship with Aitken deteriorated, and when the time came to find a publisher for Common Sense, he looked elsewhere. Robert Bell, another Scottish printer and bookseller, had a shop on Third Street next to the Anglican St. Paul’s Church and was a prominent supporter of independence. Bell had also published a number of the enlightenment-era tracts that informed the independence movement. Among these was the conservative English jurist William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which contained a defense of the people’s right to replace a monarch who acts against English constitutional principles. Bell agreed to publish Common Sense at his own expense and on January 10, 1776, the first copies began to issue from his press.
Nothing Bell—or any other colonial printer—had ever published approached the impact of Common Sense. Indeed, nothing anybody in the English-speaking world had ever published had a publishing history quite like Common Sense. Within a year, tens of thousands of copies were in circulation—many times that of an ordinary pamphlet. In 1776 alone, Common Sense went through nearly forty printings in the colonies and about half that number in Britain. The pamphlet’s popularity was a measure of its success. “Its effects,” Rush recalled, “were sudden and extensive. . . . It was read by public men, repeated in pubs, spouted in schools and in one instance delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon.” One Philadelphian recalled that “Common Sense . . . is read to all ranks; and as many as read, so many became converted; though perhaps the hour before were most violent against the least idea of independence.” A New York newspaper noted, “A pamphlet entitled Common Sense has converted thousands to Independence, that could not endure the idea before.” And several years later, during a diplomatic mission to France, John Adams was stunned to find that “the pamphlet Common Sense was received in France and all Europe with rapture.”9
GIVEN ITS enormous popularity, Common Sense could have been a path to financial security for Paine. But at a time when he was asking Americans to make the terrifying journey to independence, there could be no profit amid so much danger. Better to show that, contrary to what most of his critics would contend, his was not an act of opportunism. That “the sun never shone on a cause of greater worth” than American independence was something Paine would have to defend with both his pen and his person.10
He donated his share of the profits from Common Sense to the desperate Continental Army, established by the Continental Congress after the outbreak of fighting in 1775. He also financed a second cheaper edition with his own meager savings. In an even bolder demonstration of commitment to cause, Paine would join the Continental Army. Paine’s Quaker origins, his recent predilection for urban, literary employment, his now familiar rhetorical powers, never mind his age, would all appear to make him among the least likely citizen-soldiers Philadelphia could muster. But just days after the Continental Congress submitted to the world a formal Declaration of Independence, he marched off to war.