And there was no doubt about it—America possessed the means by which to reverse that absurd relationship. The American colonies possessed, Paine claimed (in what may have been at least one instance of overoptimism and perhaps of outright falsehood in his argument), the largest and most well-disciplined army in the world. Moreover, the American economy was strong and free of debt. And, looking to the necessity of raising a navy to combat British attempts to blockade American ports, Paine boasted that supplies of timber, iron and cordage—the staples of shipbuilding—as well as tea, were more abundant in America than anywhere in Europe.21
One of the most striking features of Common Sense is the way in which it consciously avoided any reference to the situation or interests of any of the individual American colonies. In contrast, in the journals of the Continental Congress and the correspondence of particular members of that Congress, the provincial interests of particular colonies were always on display. Paine’s arguments, on the other hand, were always directed at a united America, even if that united America was in January of 1776 more a hope than a reality.
One of America’s great strengths, Paine asserted, was the success of the colonies in manifesting a “spirit of good order and obedience to continental government.” One of the most powerful arguments in favor of independence, he asserted, “is that nothing but independence, i.e., a continental form of government, can keep the peace of the continent and preserve it inviolate from civil wars.” Paine’s description of the strength of the “continental” bonds that held the colonies together was at the moment he wrote Common Sense exceedingly overoptimistic. But it was at the same time self-fulfilling, for one of the most potent effects of Common Sense would be to cause those across the expanse of the British mainland colonies who read it to think of themselves not as settlers of the British colony of Georgia, Maryland or New York but as Americans.22
As he was writing Common Sense in his room above Robert Bell’s bookshop on Third Street in Philadelphia and in close touch with advocates of independence such as Rush, Franklin and Sam Adams, Paine was well aware of the divisions within the Continental Congress between those arguing for continuing efforts at reconciliation and those who had given up all hope for such an outcome. For that very reason, his arguments were aimed not only at mobilizing the public to embrace the idea of independence but also to energize them into pressing their congressional representatives to embrace that idea as well. Professing what was probably not a wholly sincere desire to avoid giving offense to those in and outside the Congress who had been advocating reconciliation, Paine went on to place those men in several highly unflattering categories: “interested men who are not to be trusted; weak men who cannot see; prejudiced men who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to their continent than all the other three.”23
Paine knew well the identity of that “last class” of men—John Dickinson foremost among them—and certainly one aim of Common Sense, an aim endorsed by Paine’s Philadelphia patrons, was to increase the pressure on them to stop their equivocation and get on the revolutionary bandwagon.
And revolution was what Paine had in mind. In one of the concluding passages of an extra section that he added to the second edition of Common Sense, published just a few weeks after the first edition, he observed that
there are three different ways by which an independency may hereafter be effected; and that one of the three will one day or other, be the fate of America, viz. By the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob. It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude a body of reasonable men; virtue . . . is not hereditary, neither is it perpetual. Should an independency be brought about by the first of those means, we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth.24
Although Tom Paine has come to be known as the most radical of the American revolutionaries, he understood, at least at this stage in his long and controversial career as a pamphleteer and polemicist, that a military coup was not likely to produce justice. Nor could the mob on the street be counted on for virtue or good judgment. It was only by “the legal voice of the people in Congress”—an important validation of Congress’s legitimacy—that a truly just and lasting independence could be achieved.
The opportunity offered by that united effort, endorsed both by the Congress and the people at large, was awe-inspiring. Americans could, he believed, create “the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth.” In what was probably the most stirring and optimistic passage in a pamphlet largely devoted to angry denunciations of the British king and the system of government he embodied, Paine exulted:
We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birth-day of a new world is at hand, and a race of men perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months. The Reflexion is awful—and in this point of view, How trifling, how ridiculous, do the little, paltry cavellings, of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.25
America, indeed, the world, had never seen anything like Common Sense. Within ten days copies of the pamphlet were already circulating in Virginia and Massachusetts. The first edition of 1,000 copies sold out in a few weeks. At that point, the cantankerous Paine got into a bitter argument with Robert Bell, both over his share of the profits and over additional arguments he wished to add to a second edition. He then arranged with another printer for a run of 6,000 copies of the expanded edition and contracted with the Philadelphia printers and entrepreneurs Thomas and William Bradford to sell them. As part of that agreement, Paine took the extraordinary step of forswearing any profits for himself, instead donating his share to the Continental Army for the purchase of mittens for its soldiers.26
Within three months of its January 10 publication, 100,000 copies of Common Sense had been sold throughout the colonies. By the end of the year, the number of copies sold had risen to between 150,000 and 250,000 worldwide. While pamphlets and broadsides had been a standard means of political expression in England and America for well over a century, the world had never seen anything like Common Sense. A Connecticut reader, writing in the Connecticut Gazette, gave testimony to the effect that Paine’s words were having all across America. “You have,” he wrote, “declared the sentiments of millions. Your production may justly be compared to a land flood that sweeps all before it. We were blind, but on reading these enlightening words, the scales have fallen from our eyes.”27
Moreover, the impact of Paine’s pamphlet went beyond its sales. In Philadelphia, it was “read to all ranks,” including artisans, mechanics and merchant seamen who may not have acquired the level of literacy to read it themselves. In February, one Philadelphia writer noted that “the progress of the idea of Colonial independence in three weeks or a month” had been nothing short of astonishing: “surely thousands and tens of thousands of common farmers and tradesmen must be better reasoners than some of our untrammeled juris consultores, who to this hour feel a reluctance to part with the abominable chain.”28
The publication and extraordinarily wide and rapid circulation of Common Sense did more than any event of the previous decade to awaken public consciousness across all of America and across all lines of occupation and social class to the idea of independence. But in spite of its impact among the general populace, those members of the Continental Congress who had been reluctant to embrace the idea of independence were slow to understand its revolutionary impact. Most members of the Congress did not even mention the pamphlet in their correspondence to friends and relatives back home. But some did, however offhandedly. Henry Wisner, who served in the Congress as a representative for New York only for a month in Janu
ary and February of 1776, briefly mentioned it in a letter to a friend without commenting on it, simply asking his friend to send it to the Orange and Ulster Committees of Safety and to solicit their opinion of it. On January 13 Sam Adams wrote his trusted friend James Warren telling him that he had sent a copy of Common Sense to Adams’s wife, Elizabeth. He recommended that Warren borrow the copy from Elizabeth, but at the same time asked his friend “not to be displeased with me if you find the Spirit of it totally repugnant of your Ideas of Government.” Warren, like Adams, was an ardent advocate of independence, but he, also like Adams, was concerned first and foremost with defending the autonomy of his home colony. Adams’s concerns about Warren’s reaction to the pamphlet were therefore probably related to those sections of Common Sense that emphasized the need for a supreme “continental” government capable of ruling a new American “empire.”29
There were a few members of the Congress who were more unambiguously positive about Common Sense. Josiah Bartlett, one of the first delegates to read it, quickly sent a copy to his fellow New Hampshire colleague John Langdon, noting that it was “greedily bought up and read by all ranks of people” in Philadelphia. And of course Benjamin Franklin, who, if not an active collaborator in the production of the pamphlet, was at least an approving supporter, fully embraced the logic and implications of Paine’s argument, although even he, when sending it to a friend in Paris, commented that Paine’s “rude way of writing” might “seem strong on your side.” That “rude way of writing” was of course a hugely important part of its appeal. Many of those who engaged in political writing in eighteenth-century England and America were at least as interested in displaying their own superior education and erudition as they were in winning converts to their cause, and the tone of their writing was formal, even florid. By contrast, Paine’s writing style was more direct and less formal. Although at times he allowed his anger at England and English institutions to fly off the pages, Common Sense was far from being rude or crude—indeed, its eloquence also leapt off those pages. As Edmund Randolph of Virginia later noted, it was indeed a style of writing “hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic.” It made no effort to display the author’s classical learning and, in its avoidance of the sorts of legalism that marked the political writings of American patriots such as Dickinson, Maryland’s Daniel Dulany and John Adams, it was successful in ways that those writers were not in reaching a mass audience.30
As for John Adams, it would have been very odd indeed if the Braintree lawyer and activist had not expressed his own opinions about Common Sense. Adams had left Massachusetts to travel back to Philadelphia in late January and had apparently not seen a copy of Common Sense before his departure. Taking a circuitous route back to the Congress, he did not lay his hands on the pamphlet until he happened upon a copy while traveling through New York in mid-February. He immediately sent a copy to Abigail commenting that he thought the sentiments expressed in it would soon become “the common faith.” By April of 1776, when it was clear to all that Paine’s work had become a runaway best seller and was having a profound influence on public opinion, Adams began to mix grudging approval with sniping criticism. He acknowledged that Common Sense was a “meritorious Production” which was to be commended for its “elegant Symplicity,” but he then went on to criticize it in nearly every aspect. “In Point of argument there is nothing new,” he commented. “I believe that every [argument] that is in it had been hackneyd in every Conversation public and private, before that Pamphlet was written.” By May of 1776 Adams had ramped up his ire at Common Sense. Focusing on Paine’s advocacy of annually elected, single house legislatures in the individual states, he railed against the pamphlet as doing “great Evil.” And while acknowledging the power of Paine’s writing style, he pronounced him “very ignorant of the Science of Government.”31
In the months following publication of Common Sense, as the pamphlet gained in popularity and as Adams became more and more annoyed by the growing popularity of Paine’s ideas about the virtues of “democratical” state governments, the Braintree lawyer was moved to take more direct action to counter Paine’s views. In late March of 1776, writing anonymously in the form of “A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend,” he produced his own pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, in which he attempted a systematic refutation of Paine’s ideas, pointing to their anarchical consequences. Soon after, Paine engaged him in a discussion of their conflicting views, a exchange that Adams characterized as being marked on Paine’s part by a “conceit of himself and a daring Impudence.”32
Adams would never let go of his animus, likely motivated in the main by pure envy, toward both Paine and Common Sense. Later in life, as he was writing his autobiography, he indulged himself in an extended diatribe. Although he could not disassociate himself from Paine’s advocacy of independence, he brushed aside Paine’s arguments for separation from Great Britain as wholly unoriginal—“a tolerable summary of the Arguments which I had been repeating again and again in Congress for nine months.” This assessment was preposterously wide of the mark. Adams had been a vigorous advocate of independence inside the walls of the Pennsylvania State House, but his arguments even in that closed forum were more legalistic and less unified than Paine’s. Whatever the depth of his intellect or the passion of his beliefs, Adams was never able to put together a single argument in favor of independence in which the whole equaled more than the sum of the parts. Common Sense, by contrast, went straight to the minds and hearts of Americans.33
Some of Adams’s venom no doubt came from the simple fact that the personalities, temperaments and intellects of the two men truly did spring from different sources. And some of it came from the very different cultural backgrounds of the Braintree Puritan and the newly arrived English immigrant. Adams could not resist noting, for example, that Paine only seemed able to write after “he had quickened his Thoughts with large draughts of Rum and Water,” a habit that contributed to his “intemperate” writing style. In sum, Adams pronounced Paine to be “a bad Character and not fit to be placed” in any position of real responsibility. And from the late spring of 1776 until his death, Adams never let go of his hostility. In 1819, writing to Thomas Jefferson, he was still complaining: “What a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted crapulous mass, is Tom Paine’s Common Sense.”34
Had Adams’s feelings about Common Sense been guided less by his intellectual and personal egotism and more by a pragmatic desire to move his fellow Americans closer to the decision in favor of independence, then he certainly would—should—have put his reservations about that part of Paine’s pamphlet with which he disagreed and embraced it enthusiastically. After all, on the most immediate issue facing both the Continental Congress and the American people, he and Tom Paine were on the same side.
And what of Adams’s longtime intellectual rival? John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, had established his reputation throughout America as perhaps the most articulate defender of American rights. It was arguably the most important political pamphlet published in America up to that time and would remain so until the publication of Common Sense. Dickinson, who still believed in the virtues of the English constitution and still earnestly wished to find some path toward reconciliation, nevertheless refrained from any public or private response to Common Sense. Although he almost certainly disagreed with Paine’s unrelenting hostility toward the “vaunted English constitution,” he was at that moment in his career not inclined to pick any additional fights with those with whom he disagreed politically. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the most visible and influential representative of Quaker opinion about the unfolding hostilities between Great Britain and America, would exercise no such restraint. On January 20, the meeting issued a “testimony” addressed not only to fellow Quakers, but also to the “people in general” of America. They professed that
It hath ever been our judgment and principle, since we were called to profess the Light of Christ Jesus . . . that the set
ting up, and putting down kings and governments, is God’s peculiar prerogative; for causes best known to himself; and that it is not our business, to have any hand or contrivance therein; nor to be busy bodies above our station, much less to plot and contrive the ruin, or overturn of any of them, but to pray for the king, and safety of our nation, and good of all men.
Tom Paine was sufficiently outraged by the Quakers’ pusillanimity that he added yet another appendix to the third edition of Common Sense in April of 1776, an appendix that, after avowing his own devotion to God and religion, went on to mount a scathing attack on the very principles of Quakerism, which, he asserted, “have a direct tendency to make a man the quiet and inoffensive subject of any, and every government which is set over them.”
Dickinson, though he had never been a member of the Society of Friends, or, indeed, any other organized religion, nevertheless was seen as being in sympathy with the general principles of Quakerism, if not their precise practices and doctrines. For that reason, many in Philadelphia believed that he was sympathetic to the anti-independence position articulated in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s “testimony.” His Pennsylvania colleague Charles Thomson lamented the fact that Dickinson’s Quaker mother and wife were “continually distressing him with their remonstrances.” And of course Dickinson’s longtime rival John Adams saw the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting testimony as one more sign that Dickinson’s views toward independence were “warped by the Quaker interest.”35
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