1776 Today it’s hard to imagine a published essay changing history. However stirring the argument, however profoundly researched, the article in the magazine or morning paper will leave the world pretty well unchanged. But Thomas Paine lived in a period in which the ‘media’ were not the newspapers, television and the internet, but the printed word and the word from the pulpit – itself often distributed in print after the first hearing.
Born in Thetford, Norfolk and radicalised in Lewes, Sussex, where he organised the local excise men, Paine was persuaded by Benjamin Franklin to emigrate to Philadelphia. There he was quickly caught up in the arguments for and against American independence from Great Britain.
Yet despite two decades of polemic, protests and petitions, not to mention skirmishes like the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party and the opening of actual hostilities in 1775, when the ‘shot heard round the world’ forced a party of British soldiers to retreat from Concord, Massachusetts, through Lexington back to Boston, to be harried by colonial militias all the way – despite all this, only a third of the delegates to the Continental Congress at the beginning of 1776 were in favour of severing ties with the mother country.
Then came Tom Paine’s Common Sense, 48 treasonable, incendiary pages, calling for an end to compromise and a decisive break from Britain. The pamphlet was an instant sensation, selling 120,000 copies in the first three months. ‘Given that America had only two million free citizens at the time,’ writes Brendan O’Neill, ‘that is the equivalent of an American author selling 15 million books in three months today.’1
By the end of the year Common Sense had sold half a million copies and gone through 23 editions. These masses of ordinary readers forced the authorities to change their minds, from those delegates to the Congress to General George Washington, who would soon lead the American Continental Army into battle against Great Britain, funded in part by the royalties from Common Sense.
How did Paine do it? He appealed to people’s common understanding of ‘nature’, a concept repeated frequently in the pamphlet. It was against the nature of geography for a small island to govern a continent. Men and women are born equal by nature, therefore it was unnatural for one man to rule others in perpetuity, especially when he had not earned his position, but merely inherited it.
Above all, knowing his audience to be made up largely of dissenting Protestants, he borrowed the non-conformist language used by radicals like Gerrard Winstanley and the 17th-century Diggers, or ‘True Levellers’ (see 10 October). ‘Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens’, he wrote, ‘from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.’ (Italics added.)
Those words in italics were hot buttons in Digger rhetoric. So were the terms Paine used to dismiss the notion that Britain was the mother country. All ‘the more shame upon her conduct,’ he parried, ‘even brutes do not devour their young’. But in any case, ‘the phrase PARENT OR MOTHER COUNTRY hath been jesuitically adopted by the King and his parasites, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds’.
In fact even more than nature, it was the credulity and idolatry that many Protestants supposed to be so characteristic of Roman Catholicism that underpinned Paine’s strictures against compromise with Great Britain. Hence his devastating satire on the notion that the divine right of British kings to rule over their subject peoples had somehow descended unimpeded and undiluted from William the Conqueror:
A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. However it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right; if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the Ass and the Lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.
1 Brendan O’Neill, ‘Who Was Thomas Paine?’, BBC News magazine, 8 June 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8089115.stm