Common Sense, Part I: Context

Having, over the last several months, delved about as far into the 19^th century as I think I’ll permit myself I’d like to engage in a slight return to form, turn back the clock and return once more to the 1770s and the glory and madness that was Revolutionary era. It was, I confess, fascinating to think about, and really dig into, how the perception and implementation in the United States of a concept like corporations changed and evolved over a period of almost fifty years. Nevertheless, I came to miss the sense of abundant and boundless possibility that seemed to infuse so much of what went on during the American Founding. Jefferson and Madison, Adams and Hamilton; these were men of intelligence, conviction, and purpose who leapt headlong into the unknown because they believed in the inviolability of man’s rights and his ability to govern himself. It was an amazing time, and they make for amazing subjects, perhaps because I still find it difficult to conceive of the task they took on and the challenges it presented. In that spirit I’d like to turn now to one of the most influential documents of the Revolutionary era, and undoubtedly the lengthiest single document I've undertaken to examine, Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet entitled Common Sense.

“But Simon,” I hear you saying, “Thomas Paine wasn't a Founding Father. Hell, he wasn't even American!” Distressing though it is that I now appear to be hearing voices, a point has indeed just been made. Paine is not among the worthies usually granted the label “Founding Father.” He was not a politician, a soldier, or really much of a diplomat. And he was, yes, born in Britain; his arrival in what would become the United States did not occur until his 37^th year. I don’t dispute any of this. What I assert, rather, is that Common Sense is just too damned interesting to pass up discussing.

Unlike Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, John Adams’ Thoughts on Government, the essays contained in the Federalist Papers or indeed the Declaration of Independence, all of which were written in an elevated, at-times philosophical style, Common Sense was structured along very different lines and intended for an altogether different audience. Rather than attempt to communicate with the colonial elite, utilizing language and references that were rooted in an understanding of the Enlightenment and ancient Greek and Roman literature, Paine’s pamphlet was more or less aimed at the mass of “common people” that made up the bulk of the Thirteen Colonies’ population. Widely uneducated, at times even wholly illiterate, they would have found Adams’ references to English poetry or Jefferson’s invocation of Lockean social contract theory both mystifying and wholly unconvincing. Accordingly, Paine wrote Common Sense in a style that was clearly and concisely phrased, contained few if any Latin or Greek references, and was rooted more in Protestant conceptions of morality than abstract European political philosophy.

Indeed, Paine’s rhetorical use of Scriptural references and his invocation of concepts like God, Satan, sin and evil further set his Common Sense apart from the abstract, philosophical, and Enlightenment-influenced arguments put forward by many of the Founders. Where Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or John Jay might make use of the term “Providence” when discussing some form of Supreme Being in keeping with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and scepticism, Paine wrote plainly of God and the Lord. Where John Adams or James Madison might quote Roman scholars like Cicero or Tacitus, Paine drew validation for his arguments from the Old Testament, the history of the Israelites and the story of Original Sin. Paine’s emphasis in Common Sense wasn't on the “natural rights” or “natural laws” that so many among the Founding Generation pointed to in their criticisms of British rule, but rather on the basic principle of morality that generations of Americans – be they Anglicans, Congregationalists, or Protestants of any stripe – had been taught as children and absorbed day in and day out as congregants in the countless churches that dotted the colonies from Georgia to Massachusetts. Paine’s intended audience was the common American, and so his approach took full advantage of their shared Biblical vocabulary.    

   

In addition to its accessibility and pious language, Common Sense was also substantially more radical than most of the pro-revolutionary literature that was being produced in the colonies on the eve of independence. Whatever his sentiments proved to be in time, Jefferson’s approach in crafting his account of the historical relationship between the colonies and the Crown (A Summary View) or providing a reasoned argument for the former’s political independence (the Declaration) tended towards the diplomatic. No lover of monarchy, he still avoided condemning the institution outright and instead placed blame on the government of Lord North (Prime Minister from 1770-1782) and to a lesser extent George III himself for the “imperial crisis” that had come to a head in the 1770s. Other commentators, like Pennsylvania’s John Dickenson, adopted a similar approach and portrayed their grievances as stemming from a disharmony between the Crown and colonies. Paine, for reasons that will be discussed in a later post, seemed constrained by no such desire for delicacy. His Common Sense contains one full section, twenty-four paragraphs in length, devoted solely to decrying monarchy as a concept and displaying the logical absurdities inherent in its existence, calling upon Scripture and simple reasoning as validation. Unremarkable as this may seem at first blush – the American Revolution being, after all, republican in nature – it’s worth remembering that a significant percentage of the colonial population in the mid-1770s, perhaps even the majority, were either dyed-in-the-wool Loyalists or unsure between the Crown and the colonies whom to support. The Founders had no desire to shock people into perhaps siding with Britain and thus advanced with discretion in their efforts to explain and justify a separation from their common Mother-country. Not so with Paine, who seemed intent on shattering any illusions the American people held about the nature of monarchy and at times did so with almost gleeful abandon.

Understanding why this was, why a man born and bred in 18^th-centry England like Thomas Paine felt compelled to argue so forcefully against monarchy, would seem to demand some understanding of where and when he came from. As it happens, however, there is little in Paine’s background that would appear to explain how he became such a radical opponent of monarchy and a fervent advocate of republicanism. Born in 1736 in Thetford, a market town in Norfolk in the East of England, Paine was the son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother. His life between 1744 and 1768 was relatively unremarkable. During this period he, in order, attended school in his native Thetford, apprenticed to his rope-maker father, briefly went to sea as a privateer, married, went into business as a rope-maker himself, lost his wife and unborn child, gained employment as a tax official, and finally relocated to the town of Lewes, Sussex. Long a centre of anti-monarchical sentiment dating back to the 17^th century and the English Civil War, Lewes was likely the sight of Paine’s philosophical awakening due to his involvement in local politics.

Specifically, Paine served on the equivalent of the town council as well as the parish vestry, and became involved in 1772 with a campaign on behalf of his fellow tax officers to demand better pay and working conditions. The the winter of 1772-73 was accordingly spent away from his post in Lewes, distributing 4000 copies of an article he’d published entitled The Case of the Officers of Excise to members of Parliament and various other notables. For his troubles Paine was dismissed for being absent from his duties without permission in the spring of 1774 and was forced to sell most of his possessions in order to avoid being sent to debtor’s prison. The following summer he departed for London where he was introduced by a colleague to inventor and diplomat Benjamin Franklin, then in Britain as several of the American colonies’ representative to the Crown. Franklin, sensible of Paine’s recent troubles, advised emigration to Pennsylvania and provided him with a letter of recommendation to that effect. Paine subsequently left Great Britain in October, 1774 and arrived in Philadelphia at the end of the following month.

His journey to America nearly ended him due to his contracting Typhoid from his ship’s contaminated water supply and he spent his first six week in Pennsylvania recovering. He became a citizen of the colony as soon as he was well enough to take the appropriate oath, and in January, 1775 became the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. There is, for better or worse, little more to Paine’s story leading up to the publishing of Common Sense than that. Still, there are certain loose conclusions that can be drawn. That Paine was a man who felt his convictions very deeply would seem relatively clear. Once he arrived at politics and political advocacy in the 1770s his passion and dedication ran deep, evidenced by his efforts on behalf of such a mundane cause as fair pay for tax officers. That this campaign ultimately cost him his means of employment and most of his possessions, and nearly landed him in debtor’s prison, doubtless shaped his perception of social justice, the indifference of Parliament, and English society more broadly.

Also worth noting is that his father was a Quaker. Granted, without any deeper understanding of the nature of their relationship, or even whether Thomas was raised in any faith at all, it’s difficult to say with any conviction that Paine’s abiding anti-authoritarianism, strong moral sense, and passion for justice were the product of his father’s religion. Indeed, considering the strongly Deist position he gave voice to during his imprisonment in France in the 1790s I might go so far as to say that piety was not a characteristic he ever put much stock in. That being said, most variations of the Quaker faith embrace ideas like social justice, are strictly anti-hierarchical, disdain outward ornamentation, and place great importance on the relationship between God and the individual believer (without the “interference” of a formal priesthood). Without saying that Paine ever considered himself, at any point in his life, a Quaker, or consciously channelled Quaker theology in his political writings, it would seem to be a decent supposition that he was influenced by their beliefs on some level.

Less theoretical, I would say, is the probable influence of Paine’s social status on his perception of the American Revolution and the crisis at its heart between the rights of the colonists and the prerogatives of the Crown. Unlike Jefferson or Madison, Thomas Paine was not born into wealth and did not inherit an extensive estate upon his father’s passing. He did not attend college, like fellow immigrant Alexander Hamilton, and he possessed no training in the law, like the majority of the American Founding Fathers. The life of Benjamin Franklin, a man of limited education and prodigious talents, is perhaps most similar to Paine’s, though his success as an author and inventor elevated him to a unique level of popularity in his adopted home-colony of Pennsylvania. Paine, rather, was a member of what we might now think of as the middle class, and likely its lower cohort at that. His father was a tradesman, in whose footsteps he followed for a time, and his formal education was limited to a five year period between the ages of 8 and 13. He neither studied the classics nor read the law, and before becoming a political activist the station to which he had managed to rise was firmly lodged in the low-tier of the British bureaucracy. In short, Paine’s understanding of concepts like capital and labour, government and society were shaped by fundamentally different experiences than the majority of the commentators and pamphlet-writers whose work is often thought to define the literary component of the American Revolution.  

This is certainly not to say that Paine was less intelligent than his better-educated colleagues like Jefferson, Adams or Hamilton. His command of rhetoric and propulsive prose style speak to a sharp mind and a complex understanding of both the problems at hand and the perceptions and biases of his audience. No, Paine’s relatively humble background rather speaks to his ability to understand and tap into the basic experiences, fears and prejudices of the average American in a way that many of the Founders simply weren't capable. A stranger to the aristocratic lifestyle of the Southern planter, the bustle of the wealthy New York merchant, or the courtly forum inhabited by the successful colonial lawyer, Paine understood how hard it could be for the average person to eke out an existence within a complex and at times indifferent economic and political environment. He knew from experience how narrow the horizons of the “common people” could be, how defined their lives were by faith and family, and how impervious they could be to abstract philosophy. Consequently the perspective through which Paine attempted to communicate in Common Sense seems specifically calibrated to plug into a mindset unfamiliar with Locke, Montesquieu or the Glorious Revolution, whose perception of right and wrong was rooted almost entirely in Scripture, and who responded best to plain speaking, plain reasoning and the occasional vulgar reference. While I might go so far as to say that Paine was donning a mask with Common Sense – that his knowledge of Enlightenment philosophy was more extensive than he let on and that his relationship to orthodox Christianity was somewhat more strained than his use of Biblical references might suggest – I believe he was able to do so effectively because he had lived in the world of the common man and been raised speaking his language. Paine’s Common Sense was thus not a scholarly essay by a trained academic, as one could say of Thoughts on Government, A Summary View or any one of the Federalist Papers, but a popular appeal from an ordinary man.