The idea that America might have a world-historic mission naturally appealed to colonists struggling to make new lives for themselves in a foreign land. But it also had an ineluctable appeal to eighteenth-century European observers bristling at home under heavy-handed monarchies, profligate aristocracies, a coercive church, and stubbornly calcified customs. Few of them confused America’s resource-rich lands with the Elysian Fields. But they thought that if ever there were a place in the world where such a sublime thing could exist, America was it. This providential notion of America gripped John Locke’s imagination in the Second Treatise of Government (1689). “Thus in the beginning all the World was America,” Locke proclaimed, casting the New World as England’s second Genesis.1
Locke’s affirmation that “all the World was America” performed a double duty. First, it foreshadowed the enormous influence his ideas would exert in eighteenth-century American life. His colonial readers adopted his hopeful empiricism, thus making his assertion that experience could chart a path to human improvement an axiom of American thought. Locke assured them that their Christianity was reasonable and therefore could tolerate the kind of religious difference they had to negotiate in their new land. And he persuaded them that they were endowed with natural rights, which meant that the role of their government was straightforward: to safeguard them. But “all the World was America” does more than augur the dramatic impact his ideas would have on Americans’ minds. It also reveals the impact that America had on Europeans’ minds.
America played an important role—both as ideal and lived reality—in the imaginations of eighteenth-century European thinkers seeking enlightenment. It ushered in a startling new picture of the natural world and all the living things upon it. It offered alluring and disturbing evidence that would catalyze an effort to raze all canons of established knowledge and to replace them with ideas unheard of in world history.
British Americans contributed to Enlightenment thought not so much by inventing new ideas about human nature, the natural world, history, and government, but by testing and reformulating ideas that in eighteenth-century Europe could only be theorized. That is not to say that America was simply a laboratory for European ideas. It became much more than that, especially during, and in the years following, the American Revolution. The very fact of its existence as a nation founded on ideals rather than hereditary claims made it both a participant in and a source of the dramatic shift in Western thought known as the Enlightenment.
The Transatlantic Republic of Letters
Ideas are immaterial, but they need material structures to make people aware of them. The sprawling, buzzing, messy transatlantic “republic of letters” provided those structures, or rather that infrastructure, for an unprecedented global traffic of ideas. The republic of letters was a vast network of feverish intellectual activity—theorizing, collecting, examining, testing, producing, disseminating, and either accepting, modifying, or skewering new understandings of human nature and the world. It was inhabited by scholars and independent thinkers, theorists and empiricists, publishing houses and salons, academies and universities. Along the republic of letters’ crooked routes traveled texts, specimens, artwork, and inventions between capitals, provinces, and remote locations across the globe. This remarkable new form of intellectual community connected James Madison in Montpelier to Samuel von Pufendorf in Lund, Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia to Mary Wollstonecraft in London, Judith Sargent Murray in Gloucester to Nicolas de Condorcet in Paris, and Voltaire to his various, though temporary, safe havens in Brussels, Cirey-sur-Blaise, Potsdam, and Geneva. But the republic of letters was more than a geographical network. It was also a temporal one, helping to bring classical Athens and Rome into the mindscapes of eighteenth-century American and European philosophers, political theorists, and poets.
Nevertheless, the circulation of Enlightenment ideas did not produce a smooth sameness across the globe. There were differences, mostly national, that gave the Enlightenment different inflections in France, Germany, Italy, England, Scotland, and the British colonies. The particularities multiply when looking beyond the transatlantic republic of letters to the wider networks of global trade, bringing “enlightened” ideas and systems of thought to and from China, India, the Hispanophone world, and beyond.
What gave the Enlightenment ideas in America their distinct form, and one strikingly different from the Enlightenment in France, in particular, is that America’s foremost thinkers were not hostile to religion. Indeed, many were friendly to religion if not deeply religious themselves. The Great Awakening of the 1740s helped pave the way for renewed spiritual commitments, and though the founders did not share in its missionary zeal, they tried to reconcile the head and the heart. “Sensibility” or “moral sense” was a keyword for them, which represented the blending of the two. Indeed, they had drawn the notion of a “moral sense” from the works of Scottish Common Sense philosophers, Thomas Reid especially, who exerted a powerful influence on American readers. The Scottish philosophers lived in the provinces of empire and came from Reformed Christian traditions, so their perspectives harmonized nicely with Americans’ experience.
In this regard, there is a world of difference between John Adams, Benjamin Rush, and Judith Sargent Murray and a thinker like Denis Diderot. “Everything,” Diderot wrote in his Encyclopédie (1772), “must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection”—and his American counterparts agreed.2 They just did not agree that doing so meant that all forms of religion must be shaken so hard that their necks snapped or, worse, that the guillotine’s blade separated their heads from their bodies.
Even Thomas Jefferson had a soft spot in his heart for rational Christianity. Though he proposed a “wall of separation between Church and State” and his Federalist critics castigated him for being a “howling Atheist,” he maintained a lifelong interest in religion and sought to ensure that freedom of religion would be a foundational principle of the new nation.3 Jefferson’s problem was not with religion or Christianity as such, but rather with people’s reliance on miracles and mysticism instead of morality. Jefferson was so interested in considering what aspects of Jesus’s life and teaching were still relevant to enlightened moderns that he tasked himself with rereading the New Testament to reintroduce himself to a human (not divine) Jesus he could believe in. Jefferson took a penknife or razor and some glue to the New Testament, cut out all of the passages he found objectionable, reordered parts of the Gospels to create a more coherent portrait of Jesus as a great moral exemplar, and titled it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820).
In the busy traffic of the republic of letters flowed new ideas about human intelligence, agency, and self-sovereignty; the ideal form of government; historical progress; and a firm belief that the unknown world was eminently knowable. This optimism helped embolden many observers to imagine that American independence was not an accident of empire, but rather a fulfillment of providence. George Washington made this providentialism clear in his “Circular to the States” of 1783. “The foundation of our Empire,” Washington contended,
was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government.4
This circular may sound like a love letter to his fellow countrymen and women, but it was actually a stern warning, much like John Winthrop’s 150 years earlier: “At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be intirely their own.”5
The Enlightened Eye and Its Blind Spots
Enlightenment thinkers put a heavy premium on the eye. They associated vision with insight, discernment, understanding, and even omniscience. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid believed that “Of all the faculties called the five senses, sight is without doubt the noblest,” while Locke maintained that sight was “the most comprehensive of all our Senses.”6 The English social theorist Jeremy Bentham took this Enlightenment glorification of the eye to new heights by developing his “panopticon” as a building plan for penitentiaries, schools, and asylums. His design put a circular structure in the center of the building so that an administrator could see all of his wards around the perimeter, but the wards were not able to see him, thus disciplining them with the specter of constant surveillance. A triumph of the enlightened eye over the forces of darkness, the panopticon was Bentham’s “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”7
The Enlightenment quest for a view of the world unobstructed by false prejudices propelled a veritable building boom of new institutions of learning to foster the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in mid to late eighteenth-century America. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia so that he and his friends could more easily share books. Twelve years later in 1743, he helped found the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the first learned society in the colonies. John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780 with the pledge “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” In the 1750s, a wave of scientific societies, literary salons, conversation clubs, subscription libraries, and study circles began cropping up all over American urban centers. Driving this flurry of intellectual foundings was the belief that open inquiry, reasoned debate, careful experimentation, and sociability are the marks of an enlightened society. Being enlightened meant valuing the free play of the mind, to be sure. But it also meant recognizing the importance of intellectual structures and training to cultivate, as Franklin’s Junto put it, “Reason’s eye.”8
The goal for educated Americans was not simply to strive for enlightenment, but also to pass that enlightenment down to future generations. Fueled by this impulse, educators established a number of colleges in quick succession, including the College of Philadelphia (later renamed the University of Pennsylvania) in 1740, the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) in 1746, King’s College (later renamed Columbia University) in 1754, Dartmouth College in 1769, the University of Georgia in 1785, the University of North Carolina in 1789, and the University of South Carolina in 1801. Harvard, founded in 1636, was the first institution of higher learning in America, and in 1643 beat all of its future rivals by choosing for its seal a word they likely would have wanted for their own institutions: “Veritas” (Truth). All of these institutions similarly sought to announce to young men that they could instill in them reason, virtue, and even wisdom. Princeton seized on “Leges sine moribus vanae” (Laws without morals are useless), the University of South Carolina promised that “Emollit Mores Nec Sinit Esse Feros” (Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel), and King’s College had the clever idea to work with the Enlightenment’s proud ocularcentrism while using the language of the Psalms: “In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen” (In thy light shall we see light).
Immanuel Kant identified this inquisitive impulse of the Enlightenment as “Sapere Aude!” (Dare to know).9 That audacious intellectual hunger and drive inspired many young American women who were barred from all of these homosocial bastions of learning. With the exception of Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1742, institutions of higher learning for women did not begin to appear until the mid-nineteenth century. However, the push for female enlightenment led to the founding of nearly four hundred female academies and seminaries between 1780 and 1830. One of those was Milcah Martha Moore’s school for girls in Philadelphia, where she provided students with a commonplace book she had compiled for their instruction: Miscellanies, moral and instructive, in prose and verse: collected from various authors, for the use of schools, and improvement of young persons of both sexes (1787). As with Jefferson’s Bible, Moore had to cut and paste fragments of wisdom from predominantly male authors to help establish what, by her own lights, were convincing examples of the way Christian reasoning and contemplation could establish an “empire in the mind” of her pupils. She too likened enlightenment to seeing anew with a well-trained eye: “active thought unseals my eye.”10
Despite Enlightenment thinkers’ passion for comprehensive vision, many of their intellectual and moral viewpoints were obstructed by some rather profound blind spots, even for their own time. That women had to work so hard to have access to a rigorous education reveals one of the ways in which Enlightenment thought was blinkered. Men could go to colleges and participate in one of many intellectual societies, and they had outlets for their education in ministry, the law, medicine, and public life more broadly. Women did not. Nor did they have many male Enlightenment thinkers giving them a hand as they sought to have these opportunities. Scottish philosopher Lord Kames could imagine a new social order, but not new possibilities for women in it: “cultivation of the female mind, is not of great importance in a republic.”11 Montesquieu and Condorcet could fathom that an enlightened civic government could have salutary implications for women’s private lives, but they never imagined that women’s activities could or should extend into the public sphere. There were exceptions, like John Locke, who offered glimmerings of hope for his female audiences. For them, reading Locke’s Two Treatises of Government could feel bracing and enlivening, like alpine winds rushing over their minds. Marriage, Locke maintained, was not the dominion of a lord over his subject but rather “a voluntary Compact between Man and Woman.”12 But others still revealed that women were largely afterthoughts of enlightened inquiry. Even in his effort to endorse female independence, James Otis asked, “Are not women born as free as men?” ironically confessing that men were really what Enlightenment thinkers had in mind when they exalted “man.”13
American women not content to let Enlightenment generalizations about “man” be a cover for a very specific demographic had to work hard to try to remove the gendered blinders of Enlightenment thought. Poet, playwright, and essayist Judith Sargent Murray stepped onto the (male) public stage with her challenge to male privilege of the Enlightenment in her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790). She argued that any differences between men and women were the result not of the human condition but rather of the condition women were forced into by Western culture. Extending the logic of Locke’s empiricism, Murray contended that anything experience does to make us who we are can also be undone by new experiences, including any real or perceived discrepancies between the male and female intellect. Murray plumbed ancient texts for examples of female intelligence and power: Athena and Minerva—the Greek and Roman goddesses of wisdom—were the favorites. But she had to work equally hard to keep them as moral and intellectual models for women rather than letting them become mascots for their fathers’ and husbands’ colleges and clubs. Denying women their independence was unbecoming a truly enlightened republic, Murray contended, and she even dared to envision a future “female Washington” should her fellow male thinkers in the transatlantic republic of letters step out from the dark shadows cast by the light of their Enlightenment.14
The universalisms of Enlightenment thought proved deceptive when it came to women and also, especially, when it came to race. A common path for Enlightenment ideas was to meet up with the social justice commitments of Quakers or strands of a liberalizing Protestantism to produce the growing antislavery movement in the northern Atlantic world.
But Enlightenment ideas also took another path, which sent them back to familiar ways of viewing social worlds and providing new justifications for them. For thinkers along that second path, the latest Enlightenment science proved that the differences between the races are as clear as black and white. Whether enlightened Americans lived in the North or South tended to make a big difference, though not a determinative one, in the way they absorbed Enlightenment views of race. Nonslaveholders and even many slaveholders in the North and Mid-Atlantic states saw the findings of Enlightenment racial science as inconsonant with slavery, while for those in the South and the British West Indies, it confirmed the permanent, immutable differences between the races.
Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) demonstrates how his enlightened anthropology looked for escape clauses in its claims for a common humanity when it came to nonwhites. Jefferson thought that Africans and African Americans had less body hair than do white Americans. They secreted a foul-smelling odor. They could tolerate heat better but cold worse than whites. They required less sleep. None of these claims would have been particularly objectionable to enlightened antislavery advocates. But when he moved on to issues of blacks’ intelligence and their capacity for freedom, abolitionists drew the line. “In memory [blacks] are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” Jefferson’s careful investigations (thanks to living among the six hundred African Americans he owned over the course of his life) demonstrated that their imagination proved “dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” But when he considered his racial distinctions from the vantage point of a reasonable and fair Creator—the only kind he could possibly believe in—he confessed nagging doubts about his scientific defense of chattel slavery and whether history would be on his side: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!”15
Generations of historians have tried to make sense of this claim. Did it reveal a deep fissure that threatened to shatter his Enlightenment framework? Or was it just a random thought that enabled the framework to stay firmly in place? Jefferson did not defend slavery, though he remained a slaveholder until his death. And so new generations of historians will keep asking these questions. But no matter what they conclude, they will no doubt agree that Jefferson provided an authoritative framework and conceptual language for marking racial difference, which would justify the evils he thought unfortunate and hoped were remediable.
Jefferson drafted these words while an army of slaves served his every physical need—an indication that racial oppression was not simply a subject of late eighteenth-century intellectual inquiry but rather provided its material foundation. Nowhere is this connection between racial oppression and intellectual production more conspicuous than in early American universities and colleges themselves. Much like Jefferson, who penned paeans to freedom while he had a workforce of slaves, early American universities were not only sites of Enlightenment race science but also the beneficiaries of racial oppression. Without exception, every American college was built on Native Americans’ dispossessed lands. Their connections to slavery varied in scope and kind, but none of them was exempt. Enslaved African Americans helped build many college campuses; in the case of the University of Virginia, they were the sole workforce. Many colleges received large endowments from slave merchants to purchase real estate to build new university campuses, as well as fund professorships. Others, such as Georgetown University, founded in 1789 by John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, were able to pass along their funding drawn from the slave economy to students by making enrollment tuition-free. Others heavily recruited children of wealthy slave owners because the children could be cultivated as future trustees.
However, slavery was not just behind the scenes of university knowledge production; it was also an overt presence on early American college campuses. At most colleges, the remuneration for the president came in the form of an annual income and slaves. Some presidents even brought their personal slaves with them. Harvard president Increase Mather (1692–1701) brought an enslaved man given to him by his son Cotton to tend to daily chores. So when Harvard president Benjamin Wadsworth (1725–37) decided to bring his slave Titus with him and to purchase a new “Negro Wench” to join him, he was simply upholding a Harvard tradition.16
Many colleges owned slaves who cared for the grounds of campuses and waited on professors and students alike. Students often brought their own personal slaves with them; in 1754 a number of students at the College of William and Mary paid for additional housing so they could bring their human chattel along to serve them while they studied. Even death did not release African Americans from serving the university. Anatomical dissection was a path to discovering the Enlightenment’s desire to understand the body and boosted the prestige of medical colleges that could provide postmortem dissections; the easiest and cheapest bodies to acquire were those of blacks and poor whites. In time, antislavery advocacy would make its way onto American college campuses, but not enough to fully extricate most of them from connections to slavery until after the Civil War.
The most vivid exemplar of the blinkered brilliance of the Enlightenment’s enthusiasm for human potential was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is remembered as the towering figure of the Enlightenment in America because he embodied so many of the traits future readers would find inspiring. As if to testify to the range of human capacity he so exalted, Franklin himself was a printer, ambassador, writer, philanthropist, and experimental scientist. As a publisher and a thinker, he was attentive to the incorporeal dimension of ideas, as well as material ones. He was a master of speculative inquiry and empirical analysis, and was a wellspring of jovial curiosity about his world. He started intellectual institutions founded on the idea of useful knowledge. And when he noticed that other useful things were missing from his world, he envisioned them and gave them material form. Franklin invented swimming fins as an eleven-year-old in 1717, and the lightning rod and an improved urinary catheter in 1752. In 1762, he produced the world’s first odometer, and in 1768–69 identified and named the Gulf Stream. And as if to offer a tribute to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of the eye with its powers of dispassionate observation, Franklin invented bifocals (“double spectacles” as he referred to them) in 1784. He wanted to conquer the effects of aging to make his “eyes as useful to me as ever they were.”17
But of all of Franklin’s intellectual projects, the one he perfected the most was himself. Franklin both championed and embodied the Enlightenment’s premium on human plasticity and improvement. Having come from a modest family of soap and candlemakers, he did not want to wait for a higher power to bestow him with good fortune or condemn him to a life of modest means. So he took his life into his own hands. In his Autobiography (1791), he explained his “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” suggesting these were technologies of the self any reader could employ.18 Perfection meant turning the twelve virtues he wanted to cultivate into second nature: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, and chastity. When a Quaker friend gently reminded him that he had left out one virtue he could use a little more of—humility—Franklin conceded and added it to the list to bring it up to thirteen.
Franklin had his glorious vision of self-perfection and a perfectable world, and he had his bifocals to help him see grand achievements in the distant future, as well as practical steps to realize them up close. But as a quintessential Enlightenment figure, he too had his social blind spots. In addition to his knack for industriousness and regimentation, he had his common-law wife, Deborah, to take care of their two children and his illegitimate son; a devoted sister, Jane, who, though an impoverished mother of twelve, served as her elder brother’s scribe, family recordkeeper, and personal soap maker; and household slaves who tended to his earthly needs so that he could devote his time to cultivating his virtues. (He eventually manumitted his slaves and late in life became an abolitionist.) But while he extolled independence, he had a virtual staff of loved ones and subordinates to help him cultivate his self-reliance. Franklin, much like many of the other brilliant but nevertheless all-too-human philosophes of the transatlantic Enlightenment, was blind to the social and economic conditions that made his quest for Enlightenment possible.
Revolutionary Republicanism
Enlightenment ideals animated the trinity of late eighteenth-century political revolutions in the British colonies, France, and Haiti. In each setting, former supplicants to monarchs, feudalism, and empire razed and remade their country’s entire political, economic, and legal topography, and with it, the course of world history. None were without enormous human costs, or without evidence that while human ingenuity and collective will can lead to innovations such as the Declaration of Independence (1776), they can also produce disturbing inventions such as the guillotine (in France in 1789). Although the American Revolution cannot exclusively claim to have put Enlightenment ideals into practice, it can claim to have been the first to try to do so. The prospect that a modern nation could be founded on a shared set of ideas, rather than a shared Volk, history, language, or religion (which America had none of), seemed too impossible to achieve and sustain for many observers at the time, including some of the American revolutionaries themselves. Thus, before waging a fearsome war over the future of the colonies, a dramatic intellectual transformation had to occur first. As John Adams later put it: “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”19
Enlightenment thinking circulated through all of the highways and byways of the transatlantic republic of letters, catalyzing a radically new view of a progressive universe, and with it, the prospect that the future of humankind could look better than its past. It was crucial to revolutionary-era literate Americans, but it required another intellectual concept to turn its ideals into an actual model of a government and its people. “Liberty” was the key term, but also a hazy one. It was the invocation of the word “republican” that helped give colonists’ angry grievances and vague aspirations their radical form. What they meant by “republican” seems straightforward by modern standards, even indubitable. But for that time, it seemed both outrageous and utopian: namely, a government for the res publica (literally a “public matter” or “public affair,” which in eighteenth-century political thought became identified as “the public good”). What kind of government fosters and defends a public good? The “republican” answer was a government that is run by its citizens rather than one headed by a hereditary king.
Republicanism had to travel far and wide before making its entrance into the textual marketplace and then into the minds of revolutionary Americans. They picked it up and reformulated it from the English-Dissenting tradition, which had picked it up and reformulated it from Renaissance political thought, which in turn had picked it up from (or rather imagined how it was in) antiquity. When American revolutionaries came into contact with republican discourses, they did not imagine themselves working with centuries of intellectual adaptations, accretions, and deletions. Rather, they thought themselves directly—and forcefully—into the world of Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and Tacitus. They imagined a classical past as a guide to a future America, in which participatory government drew its strength and stability from an independent, virtuous citizenry of equals. Privileges of birth and markers of rank had no place in such a body politic. Distinction was welcome, but only a distinction of merit.
The classical world invoked in republican rhetoric was alive in the colonists’ everyday interactions, framing their political apprehensions and aspirations accordingly. As John Adams later put it, “When I read them I seem to be only reading the History of my own Times and my own Life.”20 Women were especially resourceful in repurposing republicanism to fit their current needs. They inhabited a new world of the republican mother who fulfilled her public obligation to the res publica by privately distilling and safeguarding virtue in her husband and children. Literate revolutionary-era Americans did not encounter corrupt British imperial administrators so much as experience them as examples of the sort of immoderation described in Cato’s Letters (1723). The temptation to backslide and put private interests ahead of the collective welfare awakened revolutionaries’ inner Cicero, who whispered reminders about the ennobling power of virtue directly into their consciences. Voicing one’s opinion in the newspaper required Sallust and Tacitus as models for a plain style of republican persuasion, as well as a classical figure to provide the appropriate pseudonym. And whenever George III revealed himself to be utterly unmoved by his colonists’ pleas, they had Polybius affirming the necessity of mixed government. The classical world provided both a template for good governance and a warning about what would happen if public virtue flagged. As political thinker Hannah Arendt would put it: “Without the classical example . . . none of the men of the revolutions on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”21
Thomas Paine and the War of Ideas
The ideas of the Enlightenment clearly energized a new faith in human will, ingenuity, and capacity for self-sovereignty. But revolution? Even the most promising ideas cannot capture historical actors’ imaginations enough to thrust them into war without the right conditions on the ground. And so it was in eighteenth-century America. A progression of developments—some the result of chance or contingency, others the result of shortsightedness—made notions of popular sovereignty and constitutionalism in accordance with natural rights seem plausible.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, socioeconomic and demographic transformations altered the way colonists made sense of themselves on the edges of the British Empire. Increasing immigration intensified demands for new lands to settle. Economic forces led the colonies’ wealth to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, thus dramatically intensifying social and economic stratification among whites. As the diversity of population and stratification grew, so too did forms of social differentiation, causing a gap between colonists’ traditional modes of understanding the world and the dizzying changes around them. The French and Indian War added upheaval to the colonies, but what seemed worse from their perspective was the British response to it. To cover the costs of war and imperial expansion, Great Britain instituted a number of measures that raised tensions with colonists. First came the Proclamation Line of 1763, then the Currency Act of 1764, then the Sugar Act of 1764, and then the Stamp Act of 1765, each one more punishing than the one before. The Boston Massacre of 1770 sparked a crisis, but the Tea Act of 1773 and the Coercive Acts of 1774 put agitated colonists over the edge. Suddenly revolutionary ideas of self-sovereignty, which had been circulating in books, broadsides, and newspapers for years, took on a new urgency. Republicanism pushed them to recognize that they were not the beneficiaries of British imperialism but rather its victims.
But amid all that flurry of print electrifying the colonists, one pamphlet truly awakened them to the prospect that their time to claim independence was now: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776). World-changing texts achieve their effectiveness through a collaboration of the author’s powerful ideas, the right language to express them, and historical circumstance. This helps explain how Thomas Paine set heated colonists ablaze with republican righteousness in January 1776, when Common Sense first appeared, and why it needed to go through twenty-five editions in that same year alone. Paine had arrived in America from England just thirteen months earlier, a debt-ridden corset maker with a failing second marriage. Paine was essentially homeless, his only anchor to the world at that time his passionate belief in the evils of monarchy and the promise of liberty and equality for the common man.
To call Common Sense an “Enlightenment” text does not quite do justice to its rhetorical and intellectual innovations, which help to show why this text in that time and place had the convulsive power to break history in two. He published it anonymously, which was not uncommon for the time, though most authors preferred pseudonyms to anonyms. (Some of John Adams’s friends thought he was its secret author, which partly flattered him because of the sheer force of its ideas and partly offended him because they were expressed in such a vulgar manner. Paine had called King George the “Royal Brute of Britain” but realized that was too complimentary because “even brutes do not devour their young.”)22
Paine exchanged Latin words for biblical passages, pretense for unsparing candor and sincerity, and the language of learned elites for the expressions and rhetorical forms of common people. Instead of speaking to his audiences from a voice on high, as so many other Enlightenment-era writers did, he voiced his claims from the vantage point of one down low, expressing what it felt like to be pinned to the ground by the heel of a tyrant. In a typically enlightened fashion, he laid out general arguments about the “sinfulness” of monarchy, but he particularized each and every one to the American situation, and then generalized again, giving the fight for independence a world-historical grandeur: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”23 He found a voice of “public opinion” among competing factions that did not exist prior to, but was instantiated in, the process of readers taking in his rhetoric. He implored them that the time to act is now, before the forces of history pull away from them. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” were the right words at the right time. They confirmed to British colonials that they were the virtuous, independent community of equals whom the republicans of antiquity had in mind, and that the colonists had Providence on their side. In all, the enthralling lucidity of Paine’s prose and the power of his ideas made dreams of independence appear eminently possible.
Looking at the American Revolution through the lens of intellectual history helps draw out the importance of ideas for motivating colonists to take up arms and for giving them a vision of the new way of life for which they were fighting. “Enlightened” and “republican” ideas were central to the drama, as they helped colonists envision a different course than the one they were on, gave motivation that they could effect that change, and provided explanations of what was happening to them during and after the fighting. Making a claim for the causal force of ideas is always a little risky. But in the case of the American Revolution, it is unassailable. British Americans had to believe they had “it in [their] power to begin the world over again” in order to make the effort and take huge risks to try to do so. No doubt, impulsiveness and not a small amount of irrationality are involved in any war, especially a civil war like this one. But in the case of the American Revolution, a prime factor in the causes of the war and the course of a new nation thereafter was the power of ideas. Early Americans needed to think they could make the world anew before attempting to do just that.
