Friday, June 26, 2015

Common Sense, Part VI: Realpolitik

Paragraphs thirty-one through fifty-four of the third section of Common Sense focus less on general complaints against the relationship between the Crown and the colonies, as had those preceding them, and more on a frank assessment of the costs the nascent Revolution had exacted and the unique opportunities it offered. These sections represent Paine at perhaps his most vitriolic. While in previous paragraphs he spared no bile in attacking the roots of monarchy on general principle and decrying its perpetuation as absurd, the second half of section three is rife with specific denunciations of George III, his ministers, and the actions British army. Finished, it would seem, with drawing the attention of his audience to logical absurdities and requesting they exercise their sense of objective reason, Paine instead appeared determined to rouse their anger, resentment, and even fear in order to compel them to action. To that end the aforementioned paragraphs contain, in addition to powerful, if un-nuanced, rhetoric, tentative plans for both a permanent continental government as well as a constitutional convention. Apparently unsatisfied with mere criticism – surprising given the clearly evident relish with which he proceeded – Paine tried his hand at construction as well, phrased in such a way as to invite popular scrutiny, discussion and (shudder) participation. Before putting forward his admittedly rudimentary plan of government, however, he first needed to make it clear why said government was absolutely necessary, and how the events of the Revolution presented the ideal opportunity.

By Paine’s estimate, judging from the arguments he put forward in paragraphs thirty-one and thirty-two of section three, there were essentially two potential outcomes to the Revolution. The first, which he strongly advocated for, was the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from any form of British administration and their complete and total political independence. This would have carried with it a raft of obstacles, not the least of which was the formation of a national government. That being said, Paine seemed well-assured that whatever difficulties Americans encountered following liberation from British rule would be preferable to the alternative. That being, or course, the second outcome; a negotiated settlement of the original political dispute between Britain and the colonies, no doubt requiring the repeal of offending legislation, and a resumption of the status quo. This, Paine sought to communicate in no uncertain terms, would have been completely unacceptable, “or in any way equal to the expense of blood and treasure we have already been put to.”

As mentioned at the outset of this little adventure, Common Sense was first published in Pennsylvania in January, 1776; the Battles of Lexington and Concord took place in April, 1775. Between those opening clashes, the campaign that followed in and around Boston and the invasion of British Canada in June, 1775, eight months had elapsed, approximately 1,000 Continental Army servicemen had lost their lives, and a further 1,500 had been captured. While many Americans remained outside the zone of conflict and would continue to do so until the British invasions of New York (July, 1776) and the South (December, 1778), enough states contributed forces to these early offensives to consider them truly national endeavours. Aside from the Massachusetts militiamen and later Continental regiments that featured prominently in the Boston campaign, the expeditions of Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold to Quebec were comprised of soldiers from New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the disputed territory later known as Vermont. Of these men not an insignificant number had perished; fathers, sons and brothers. Families from across the United States had been affected, and millions of dollars had been spent. It was Paine’s fervent hope, as he expressed in often incendiary terms in Common Sense, that the end result of these sacrifices would be more than the resumption of the status quo.

“The object, contended for,” he wrote to that effect in paragraph thirty-two, “ought always to bear some just proportion to the expense.” The repeal of the Tea Act, the restoration of the Massachusetts governing charter (revoked in punishment for the 1773 protest commonly known as the Boston Tea Party), and the re-opening of the port of Boston (closed in punishment for the same) were the initial aims of the First Continental Congress (September-October, 1774) and its delegates. By January, 1776, however, Paine no longer considered such an outcome acceptable. Too much had happened, he asserted, too many had died and were continuing to die for so paltry a reward. No doubt seeking to appeal to his readers’ sense of justice and moral outrage Paine invoked in the same paragraph recent events like the Battle of Bunker Hill (June, 1775), and asked his fellow colonists to consider whether the almost 500 Americans lives lost there were worth the revocation of policies widely known to have been illegitimate from the outset. He did not believe it so, though he was willing to grant that those long in favor of reconciliation where neither foolish nor naïve. “No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself,” he admitted, but the moment American blood was spilled during the “fatal nineteenth of April 1775” he found himself unable to stomach the thought of a political settlement.

This profession by Paine of his formerly conciliatory stance no doubt was aimed at those who continued to hold to the same principle. Rather than denounce them as cowards or appeasers, as some advocates for separation did and would do, Paine reached out and expressed him sympathy. “The independency of this continent,” he declared, must come sooner or later; better it be peaceful and gradual than swift and violent. Thus he portrayed himself, and those who supported the Revolution, as being justly critical of unthinking, unjustified violence. Doubtless this appealed to many who considered war against Britain to be a shocking breach of familial bonds. Blood had been shed, however, by Americans at the hands of their “brothers” from across the Atlantic. This being an indisputable fact, Paine questioned how those who had lost family and friends in the ensuing struggle could be expected to forgive their killers. Worse yet, he asked, how could the King, “with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE […] unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul [?]” Characterized thusly, the Revolution was not a violent break with tradition and history, as certain of its critics declared, but rather a reaction to the brutality of faraway regime against a people who had only desired to defend their rights. No doubt Paine intended this image of a defensive revolution, and the moral quandary presented by reconciliation, to assure those who still held on to the possibility of a return to “business as usual” that no such outcome was anymore possible. He had come to that conclusion himself, and being of a similar temper he hoped they would as well.

To those who found themselves little swayed by his moral condemnation of a negotiated return to the status quo Paine offered a series of practical criticisms in paragraphs thirty-four through thirty-six of section three of Common Sense. Suppose, he began, that the reconciliationists had their way, and the colonies and the Crown arrived at a settlement that placed the former once again under the authority of the latter. Within such a scheme, as had been the case in times past, the Crown would possess a veto on all legislation proposed and accepted by the colonial legislatures. Prior to the Revolution, as aforementioned, it had become common practice for the King to make use of this veto in order to stymie laws he and his ministers found undesirable. In essence, Paine argued, “according to what is called the present constitution […] this continent can make no laws but what the king gives it leave to.” One hostilities were concluded and peace restored, he then asked, what seemed the more likely outcome; the cessation of this practice or its even greater abuse? By Paine’s estimation the breach between Britain and the colonies occurred because the latter had become more powerful than the Crown was willing to permit. “We are already greater than the king wishes us to be,” he wrote, “and will he not hereafter endeavour to make us less?” This would seem to have been another canny move on his part; at a stroke Paine set forth his opinion of the strength of the colonies, no doubt partially in an attempt to appeal to the pride of his readership, at the same time he offered a conception of King George III as a somewhat less than magnanimous ruler. Far from the benevolent, disinterested figure that monarchist political theory envisioned, he characterized the reigning British sovereign as petty, arbitrary, and incapable of forgiving slights against his authority. In addition to being rooted in an Enlightenment-derived distrust of unchecked authority, this portrayal was also a highly grounded one (the King as a man, and thus pray to all the weaknesses common to that species). No doubt Paine hoped it would resonate with the equally-grounded audience at which Common Sense was aimed.

There was, Paine admitted in paragraph thirty-five, a point to be made against his critique of the King’s veto, however. In addition to possessing the ability to refuse assent to laws originating in the Thirteen Colonies, the Crown reserved the same right with respect to those bills proposed and accepted by the British Parliament in London. Yet, Paine supposed his critics would say, Common Sense seemed to take no issue with the veto being exercised in Britain, though it had the same effect and functioned via the same logic as when it was exercised in the colonies. The root question this apparent contradiction would seem to give rise to is, why was the veto acceptable in one instance and unacceptable in the other? Paine’s reply was predictably forthright. England, he reminded his readers, was the home of the British monarchy, and America a distant satellite. While from time to time the King may have exercised his veto against legislation but forth by Parliament, he would scarcely do so as a means of disrupting the commerce, weakening the institutions, or disturbing the defences of the state over which he presided, and from which he derived his strength and authority. The Thirteen Colonies, Paine asserted, would never be so lucky precisely because of their distance, and because of the threat their potential strength posed to the sovereignty of the Crown. “He will scarcely refuse his consent,” he wrote of George III, “to a bill for putting England into as strong a state of defence as possible, and in America he would never suffer such a bill to be passed.” Again Paine seemed to appeal to the vanity of his audience – the King acted against the colonies because he considered them a threat – while couching his argument in very plain, adversarial, and concise language.

In his final argument against the dubious prospect of submitting once more to the authority of a king and his ministers who had proved themselves both deceitful and vicious, Paine argued in paragraph thirty-six of section three that a return to the status quo would in reality constitute little more than a fleeting illusion. Just as a peaceful resumption of the customary relationship between the colonies and the Crown would not erase the memory on either side of the bloodier aspects of the dispute, neither would the King forget the object he had hoped to attain in the first instance by attempting to abrogate the traditional rights of the colonists. One of the immediate causes of the Revolution, by Paine’s estimation, was the suppression by the Crown of the growth and prosperity of the Thirteen Colonies. This had been attempted via the imposition of onerous taxes, trade restrictions, and harsh punishments for perceived slights, all theoretically playing to the advantage of Britain because they helped maintain the colonies in a subordinate position. While it was possible, Paine allowed, that King might agree to repeal the reviled taxes and restrictions in an effort to foster reconciliation, there would still have been little to stop him or his successors from accomplishing, “BY CRAFT AND SUBTILITY, IN THE LONG RUN, WHAT HE CANNOT DO BY FORCE AND VIOLENCE IN THE SHORT ONE.” Having proved himself, in Paine’s eyes, willing to destroy those of his own subjects who stood firm and rejected what they knew to be illegitimate actions taken by the Crown, what reason would George III have for not continuing along the path he had set out upon? Force having proven futile, why would he not simply work in secret towards the same end? Again borrowing from the intellectual playbook of the Enlightenment, in this case its fascination with/tendency to connect power with notions of conspiracy, Paine endeavoured to speak to existing distrust among his readers of the King, his advisers, and authority in general. Rather than ask his fellow colonists to wrap their minds around a new and unusual philosophical concept he instead confirmed what many of them doubtless were already convinced of, that power is fundamentally untrustworthy.

I hope that I don’t come across as hopelessly tedious when I repeat myself like this (or perhaps you hadn't thought so until I just now mentioned it), but the great strength of Paine’s arguments in Common Sense stem from their simplicity, their rhetorical force, and how little they asked of the reader. The section just detailed, encompassing three paragraphs near the middle of section three, is no different. As was Paine’s modus operandi throughout his 1776 pamphlet, the arguments therein put forward were devoid of the philosophical complexities common to the works of fellow revolutionaries like Jefferson, Adams, James Madison or John Dickinson. The questions he asked his readers were simple, based in plain reasoning, and backed by recent rather than ancient history. Is a king who has long abused his veto on our laws fit to continue as our sovereign lord? Is it reasonable to expect him to forget that we raised our hand against him and help us to grow and prosper in the coming years? Can he be trusted not to attempt to undermine us in the future, after having proved himself willing to oversee the slaughter of our friends and neighbours? These were not complex questions but they possessed a powerful moral weight, and spoke to an understanding of the British monarch that was not difficult for the average American to grasp. They had at that point suffered under close to a decade of burdensome tax policies, centuries of obstructive trade regulations designed to enrich the empire of which they were presumably a part, and eight months of bloody slaughter at the hands of an army and navy once mobilised for their defence. Doubtless they were in a receptive temper towards arguments against the legitimacy of the Crown and the prospect of reconciliation.

Friday, June 19, 2015

Common Sense, Part V: Plain Reasoning, contd.

From nationality, Paine shifted in paragraphs fifteen through eighteen of section three of Common Sense to a discussion of some of the economic benefits to be derived from independence. Taking account of the resources at the disposal of colonies, and their geographic location relative to the great empires of the 18th-century world, it was his opinion that commerce was the surest means by which America might secure to itself, “the peace and friendship of all of Europe.” Considering the number of European powers, including Britain, that possessed territory in the Americas and the potential market that the colonies’ population of 2.5 million represented, this would seem a reasonable claim. “It is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port,” Paine accordingly asserted in paragraph sixteen. “Her trade will always be a protection, and her barrenness of gold and silver secure her from invaders.” Unlike Mexico or Peru, he seemed to suggest, whose wealth was principally mineral in nature, the greatest resource the American colonies had to offer were their buying power; conflict would inevitably disrupt theoretically plentiful commerce, and peace and friendship secure it. Of course, Paine admonished, none of this would make any difference so long as the colonies remained lashed to Britain and its restrictive trade policies.

As was common among European empires in the 18th-century, Britain engaged in an economic practice known as mercantilism. The crux of this theory was essentially that there was a finite amount of resources of various types existing in the world. Because they were finite it was thus to the advantage of every state to attempt to secure as much of them as possible, prioritizing things like gold and silver (which were held to have inherent value), and restricting imports as much as possible. As a result of this conception of the limited nature of wealth, armed conflicts during the mercantilist era were frequently the result of competition for resources or valuable markets. Within this scheme, colonies were essentially human-powered machines that extracted resources and consumed manufactured goods. Per the dictates of mercantilism, colonies like Virginia, New York, New Spain or Brazil were prohibited from trading with either nations other than their nominal colonial overlords or the colonies of those nations. While citizens of these colonies frequently engaged in smuggling as a means of circumventing restrictive mercantilist trade policies, the majority of colonial citizens were forced to pay a premium on manufactured goods and sell their own natural resources at relatively static rates because they were chained by law to only a single market.

The Thirteen Colonies were no different, and Paine defied, in paragraph seventeen, “the warmest advocate for reconciliation, to shew (sic), a single advantage that this continent can reap, by being connected with Great Britain.” Mercantilism, Paine was correct to point out, was devised in order to move wealth chiefly in one direction, toward the seat of empire. Though advocates of the imperial economic system in Britain would, and did, argue that by carefully regulating imports the overall health of the empire could be guaranteed and a high standard of living ensured, the fact remained that the value of the colonies lay in their productive and consumptive capacities. They and their citizens did not enjoy an equal role in the British economy, but were subordinates to it. However long this had been going on, however “customary” it was, Paine argued that it was fundamentally unnecessary. “Our corn,” he wrote in paragraph seventeen, speaking on behalf of the colonies, “will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will.” Herein, Paine seemed to be attempting to get across two basic points, one abstract and one specific.

In the abstract, Paine was attempting to appeal to the basic economic understanding of his readers, many of whom were engaged in commerce in some fashion or another. Whether as shopkeepers, shipbuilders, farmers, artisans, workers, fishermen or miners, the majority of Americans in the late-18th century worked in fields that had to do either with the extraction or production of raw materials or contributed to their sale or transportation. This was for the most part a consequence of the basic material circumstances of Britain and colonial North America; England and Scotland possessed comparatively advanced manufacturing industries and limited natural resources (with the exception of coal), and the colonies possessed abundant natural resources but limited manufacturing. Americans’ understanding of the nature of the relationship between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies thus could not help but be closely tied to their individual livelihoods; Britain was the only nation said colonies were permitted to trade with, bought what they produced and sold what they needed. Having access to new markets in which to sell their raw materials, be they mineral, animal or vegetable, more partners with which to trade, and a greater variety of manufactured goods at competitive prices would thus have directly affected how a great many Americans lived their lives. Paine understood this well, having started in life manufacturing ropes used in shipbuilding, and doubtless sought to employ simple economics as a lever with which to pry his readers away from their accustomed attachment to Britain.

He was aided in this endeavour by the more specific point that Americans from across the Thirteen Colonies had already suffered at the hands of Parliament’s attempts to “regulate imperial trade.” The Navigation Acts (1651, 1660, 1663, 1673, and 1696) were intended to correct contemporary trade imbalances by effectively closing off British ports to foreign merchants and preventing overseas colonies from trading with anyone other than Britain itself. While British shipping, shipbuilding and the Royal Navy benefited greatly from the protection these acts offered, colonial Americans grew to resent the restrictions on their ability to freely sell their produce or purchase finished goods. Further acts of Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s, including the Stamp Act (1765), Townsend Acts (1767) and the Tea Act (1773) attempted to implement further “regulation” by levying taxes on manufactured goods like lead and glass, almost any form of stamped paper (court documents, contracts, playing cards, etc…) and luxury goods like East India Company tea. Because colonists were forbidden by law from seeking other sources for any of these goods, and would be severely fined in the event of a violation, they had little choice but to either pay the associated duties (thus validating the disputed right of Parliament to tax the colonies) or go without. Though Paine had not arrived in Pennsylvania until November, 1774, at which point the Stamp Act and Townsend Acts had been repealed, he knew well enough that the memory of Britain’s heavy-handed economic policies was still very fresh in the minds of his fellow colonists. Calling them to mind in Common Sense, he offered his readers the potential solution of independence; absent Parliamentary interference Americans could buy and sell as they pleased at whatever prices the market offered. Devoid of philosophy or talk of “natural rights” and “natural law,” this straightforward economic calculus doubtless appealed to the everyday experiences of the majority of late-18th century colonial Americans. Few of them could have been relied on to possess knowledge of, for instance, Lockean social contract theory, but they understood when their economic choices were being limited and the loss of opportunity that was the inevitable result.

Continuing his seemingly-exhaustive inventory of the various faults inherent in the relationship between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies, Paine next turned to certain matters of administration and geography. In the twenty-eighth paragraph of the third section of Common Sense, Paine advanced the very simple argument that the physical distance between the seat of the British Empire in London and the colonies themselves made the straightforward, timely, and efficient management of colonial affairs virtually impossible. As I pointed out many moons ago, the fact of this distance resulted in the various colonial governments developing a great deal of autonomy in matters of day to day administration, taxes, and legislation, the violation of which by Britain helped set in motion the events of the Revolution. Even accepting this autonomy, however, and the theoretical deemphasizing of rapid back-and-forth communication, the colonies themselves had by the 1770s become too complex, and Britain too eager to micromanage, for the status quo to continue for long without significant friction, modification, or its eventual termination. As Paine put it, “To be always running three or four thousand miles with a tale or a petition, waiting four or five months for an answer, which when obtained requires five or six more to explain it in, will in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness.” This represented, once again, an acknowledgement on Paine’s part of the reality of life in the colonies, and the burdens shouldered by countless Americans as a result of their distance from the seat of ultimate decision-making power. As if this natural delay wasn't bad enough, George III had by the 1770s adopted the practice of refusing royal assent (necessary for bills to become law) to legislation originating in the colonies. The lengthy interval created by the Atlantic transit aided him and his ministers in this scheme by further ensuring that certain measures approved by the colonial governments were indefinitely postponed. In this way much-needed laws, appropriations or regulations were prevented from taking effect via purposeful obstruction and the colonial governments were left in legislative limbo. To Paine this was both unacceptable and unnecessary; independence was the obvious solution.

So too would separation from Britain remedy the somewhat more elementary imbalance that Paine pointed out in paragraph twenty-nine. Britain, he pointed out, was a small island located in north-western Europe, while the Thirteen Colonies stretched along the east coast of North America, a vast continent over five thousand kilometres away. Putting aside the aforementioned administrative issues arising from this physical distance, Paine reckoned that the power relationship between the two regions seemed to flow in the wrong direction. “Small islands not capable of protecting themselves,” he wrote, “are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.” This would appear to be an overly simplistic argument, and one which I don’t suppose would hold up to scrutiny if put forward today, but Paine’s intended audience was not one defined by its nuanced thinking. To, I repeat yet again for lack of a better descriptor, the statistically average American in the 1770s this sort of self-evident reasoning doubtless had a strong appeal. Paine’s reasoning ignored the generally accepted status quo for the relationship between colonies and colonisers (established and upheld by Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, etc…), finding its basis instead in the natural world. “In no instance,” he reasoned, “hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet.” The power relationship between Britain and the colonies may have had a strong historical basis and may have been entirely in keeping with contemporary trends among European empires, but as Paine asserted it was still unnatural. A shopkeeper from Massachusetts or a farmer from Pennsylvania may not have possessed the dense historical and political background necessary to fully grasp how and why the colonies and the Crown related to each other the way they did, but they, and their innumerable compatriots, no doubt all nurtured a basic understanding of what looked or felt right or wrong.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Common Sense, Part IV: Plain Reasoning, contd.

The third section of Common Sense, by far the longest at fifty-four paragraphs, comprises Paine’s survey of the, “present state of American Affairs.” It is, accordingly, the densest, and ranges far and wide in terms of subject matter and the types of arguments it deploys. Throughout, however, Paine maintained the plain, concise, yet forceful rhetorical style that had been introduced in the first section of his pamphlet and carried through in the second. Indeed, as if to hang a lampshade on the idea, he began the third section by stating,

In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves[.]

Whether this was true or not, and I would argue that it wasn’t entirely, it remains a strong statement of authorial intent. Paine desired to make it clear to his readership that Common Sense did not seek to appeal to knowledge they didn’t possess or concepts they didn’t understand. It required no companion pieces, no additional literature in order to decipher, but rather stood alone as an article of debate that could be digested and acted upon by just about anyone. Few, if any, of Paine’s contemporaries would have found such a claim to be to their advantage. That Paine did is one of the numerous reasons Common Sense remains especially noteworthy in the context of American Revolutionary political literature.  

            As aforementioned, the third section of Common Sense covers a wide swath of at-times contentious territory. The central intent behind most, in not all, of the arguments that Paine therein put forward seemed to be a desire to break down many of the illusions held by citizens of the Thirteen Colonies about the relationship between their respective governments and that of Great Britain. This he approached first in terms of defense and foreign relations.

            To the argument that Britain’s North American colonies had long enjoyed their mother country’s military protection from attack or conquest by other European powers, Paine asserted in the eighth, ninth, and tenth paragraphs in a style we might now refer to as realpolitik, that such protection was offered only because it was to Britain’s material advantage. While granting that the colonies had indeed received military assistance from Britain in the past, it was his belief that Parliament would have, “defended Turkey from the same motive, viz. the sake of trade and dominion.” The Thirteen Colonies were thus no better than a foreign government whose resources Britain desired, the obvious conclusion being that in the event the colonists ceased to offer some useful trade good or provided a market for products manufactured in Britain itself they would no longer warrant protection. To this sobering claim Paine added that the European empires most often thought of as directly threatening the colonies, France and Spain, in fact had little reason to be hostile to Pennsylvanians, Virginians or New Yorkers, save that the French and Spanish were enemies of Britain and those American peoples were subjects of the British Crown. “Let Britain wave her pretensions to the continent,” Paine wrote in the ninth paragraph of the third section, “or the continent throw off the dependence, and we should be at peace with France and Spain were they at war with Britain.” While this is something of an oversimplification, it does indeed point to the simple truth that Spanish and French hostility towards the colonies existed in the context of global empire. From the perspective of Spain or France, therefore, the status of the Carolinas or Massachusetts as subsidiaries of Britain offered that country some form of advantage over her competitors. Sever the ties between Britain and the colonies, Paine declared, and they shall no longer be seen as a threat to her enemies.

            From foreign relations Paine dovetailed in the eleventh through fourteenth paragraphs into a discussion of what would now be referred to as nationality. Specifically, he sought to address claims that described the relationship between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies as akin to that of a mother and her children. Britain, the argument supposedly went, was the natural parent of the colonies, alike in blood, heritage, culture, language, and manners. The implication of this assertion is presumably twofold: that making war on such a closely related people was somehow unnatural, or at the very least highly regrettable; and that for the colonies to seek independence from the nation that was the font of their history and culture would make little sense. In response Paine blended his accustomed plain reasoning with a degree of Enlightenment universalism, betraying for a moment his true philosophical leanings. For a child to make war on their parent, Paine conceded, was indeed an unfortunate turn of events, and an outcome to be avoided if possible. As it stood at the time Common Sense was published in early 1776, however, it was Britain that had instigated an armed conflict with Massachusetts early in the previous year. Britain thus bore responsibility for attacking its so-called children; self-defence against that kind of brutality was natural, Paine asserted, and for which the victim was hardly to be faulted. This was simple enough answer, and had the added benefit of being (mostly) true. While it still remains unclear which side fired the first shot during the Battles of Lexington and Concord, thus opening the armed portion of the American Revolution, it was the British attempt to seize a cache of supplies stockpiled by the colonial militia at Concord, Massachusetts that set the stage for the confrontation. In Paine’s view, as no doubt in many Americans’, this placed blame for the subsequent loss of life squarely on Britain’s shoulders. Thus, however unwelcome war between the colonists and their ancestral homeland might have been it was the consequence of a reasonable response on their part to the aggression of a nation that no longer warranted the name of parent.

            Where Paine tilted away from relying almost solely on plain logic, though not entirely, was in how he followed up his assertion that Britain had abrogated its role as mother to the colonies by arguing that its claim of parentage was dubious to begin with. Specifically he stated that, “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America” because the status of the colonies as a refuge from religious and political persecution by various European governments meant that their respective populations contained more than solely British-descended individuals. “Hither have they fled,” he continued, “not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster.” The resulting polyglot nature of the colonies meant that they were not connected by cultural or linguistic ties to Britain alone. Perhaps by way of example he asserted that less than a third of the inhabitants of his home colony of Pennsylvania could be considered of English origin, yet they were no less Pennsylvanians for it. Though he was correct in pointing out the complex ethnic makeup of the colonies as of the 1770s, his data was understandably (given the lack of any kind of demographic survey) somewhat skewed. Pennsylvania’s population was perhaps closer to 60% British descent and 30% German, with the additional 10% composed of African slaves and members of neither major group. New Jersey and Delaware could be divided along similar lines, and New York was perhaps the most diverse. About 20% of its population was of Dutch extraction, with the rest composed of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, African, and various other European nationalities. Overall, taking immigration statistics dating up to 1790 as a basis, there were more people of African descent in the colonies than of English, more of German than Scottish, and more of Dutch than Welsh.

            To Paine this fact, that America was peopled by more than just the English, made it clear that the colonies owed no particular cultural or sentimental loyalty to Britain. Doubtless he counted at least in part on the fact that significant portions of the people he hoped would read Common Sense were themselves descendants of German, Swedish, Dutch or French settlers. To them it surely would have seemed like a very straightforward argument. They were not British and nor were their ancestors; whatever attachment they felt to Britain and its culture was thus likely rather shallow. In this sense Paine’s claim was as self-evident as many he had already deployed. For those colonists who were of English descent, however, the case being made in this particular section of Common Sense was somewhat more theoretical. Undoubtedly many of them did feel some kind of attachment to Britain, in terms of language, art, culture, or family history, and found the idea of severing formal ties personally distressing. Rather than sooth them by recalling that their connection to Britain was an illusion, which it manifestly wasn't, Paine instead asked them to conceive of themselves as members of a community that was defined by common ideals and sympathies rather than a shared language or history. This sort of idea, that humanity was the strongest group identification a person ought to aspire to, was very much a product of the European Enlightenment.

Common to the philosophical rhetoric of thinkers from one end of the continent to the other was an assertion that the fundamental desires of all people were essentially the same – namely peace, security, and freedom – and that as a result dividing humanity into competing nationalities was counter to social progress. Though theoretically logical, concepts such as these have proven to be among the most troublesome of the legacies of the Enlightenment. By the 18th century, though the emergence of true nationalism was yet a ways off, British culture and government at least had coalesced around a strong sense of Englishness, English history, and English liberties. Pausing a moment to reflect, it would seem that not much has changed. Just as it would be difficult to imagine most modern Americans casting aside their national identity and instead claiming membership in the broader human community, late 18th-century Americans were little different, particularly those who identified very closely with their or their families’ English origins. For this reason Paine’s inclusion of such an abstract argument in his otherwise aptly-titled Common Sense is worth noting, and invites its share of speculation. Without delving into great detail here, a question like this being worth a study all its own, I would posit that perhaps Paine was intent on spoon feeding a little of the philosophy he himself had imbibed while making a series of otherwise straightforward, utilitarian arguments. Paine was, as I mentioned previously, a somewhat more nuanced thinker than the style of arguments deployed in Common Sense would otherwise indicate. It would not seem uncharacteristic for him to want to educate his readers on the basis of a philosophical principle he believed to be important at the same time he was attempting to convince them of the merits of a more specific proposition.

To this I would add that, just as this particular section of Common Sense began with a fairly straightforward metaphor of a mother and her children it ended with a similarly uncomplicated comparison put forward by Paine in order to further illustrate his point. In the fourteenth paragraph of section three, Paine suggested that even if 100% of the population of the colonies were of English descent it should make no difference in their calculation of the merits of independence. “The first king of England,” he wrote, “of the present line (William the Conqueror) was a Frenchman, and half the Peers of England are descendants from the same country; wherefore, by the same method of reasoning, England ought to be governed by France.” Though simply phrased, this is as skilful piece of rhetoric as Paine put to use in any section of Common Sense. Not only did it make use of a common cultural touchstone – William I of England being among the best known and most influential of that nation’s monarchs – but it also spoke to readers’ intuitive understanding of the world. A person, perhaps not all that well-educated, who understood that William had indeed been born and raised in France and invaded England in the 11th century, doubtless also knew that in spite of William’s continental origins England and France were fundamentally separate entities. William’s “Frenchness” had not rendered him or his successors incapable of forging a separate cultural or political identity. Just so, Paine intimated, was the situation between Britain and the colonies. Though they had been founded and in many cases continued to be governed by people of English origin or descent, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina or Maryland had at some point in their histories become distinct political and cultural entities. For that reason, along with somewhat hazier notions of universal brotherhood, Paine declared that the Thirteen Colonies owed allegiance to no one more than their own citizens.

Friday, June 5, 2015

Common Sense, Part III: Plain Reasoning, contd.

Having pointed to some of the flaws inherent in the British monarchy as cause for concern to the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies, Paine transitioned in the second section of Common Sense to decrying monarchy itself as a form of government. This series of denunciations depicts Paine at perhaps his most radical as he gleefully dismissed the underpinnings of hereditary rule as unwise, unnatural, and unjust. This radicalism, rhetorically forceful though it was surely intended to be, remained couched in plain-spoken terms that were no doubt distinctly digestible by the average American colonist in the 1770s. Whereas Thomas Jefferson would later call for separation from Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence because the actions of Parliament and the Crown had violated the unspoken social contract between those entities and the citizens of the colonies, a claim fundamentally rooted in a philosophical abstraction, Paine endorsed independence because he believed that monarchy was quite simply a bad idea.

At its heart, Paine argued, hereditary rule was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption; namely that wisdom, nobility, or administrative acumen were inherited traits, and that fate did not sometimes reward a worthy and altruistic parent with an avaricious and unworthy child. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” he wrote to that effect in the tenth paragraph of the second section, “is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” He provided no examples of what he was specifically referring to by this turn of phrase, perhaps counting them so numerous as to be common knowledge. A cursory glance at the annals of British kingship would seem to bear this out. Henry II (1154-1189), if not a good king then certainly an effective one, was followed by his sons Richard I (1189-199), the soldier-king who nearly drained England dry to pay for his wars, and John, (1199-1216) whose weak rule witness the beginning of the end of his father’s empire in France. An example slightly more contemporary to Pain and his readers is that of James I (1603-1625), who united the thrones of England and Scotland, and his son Charles I (1625-1649), whose disregard for Parliament led to the English Civil War (1642-1651) as well as his own execution. Doubtless unversed in the history of medieval England, most American colonists in the 1770s likely had some (albeit vague) knowledge of the monarchs of the House of Stuart (who ruled Britain from 1603 to 1714). Their alternating strength and ineptitude had serious consequences for the fortunes of Britain’s North American colonies, and the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89) in particular loomed large in the American popular imagination.

Paine was doubtless attempting to play to the common understanding of the British monarchy that was held by the average, formally uneducated American with arguments such as these. To his benefit, the monarchs of the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover (1714-1901) had generally proven themselves to be somewhat less than virtuous and self-sacrificing. Yet Paine was not content merely to solicit agreement that the last century or so of English monarchy leading up to the 1770s had witnessed a downslope in quality. Rather, he was keen to point out to his readership that the very concept of monarchy was, and always had been, morally bankrupt. This he set out to do by using plain, at times even course or crude, language as a means of demystifying kingship and its various trappings. William I (1066-1087), commonly known as William the Conqueror, Paine accordingly described in the thirteenth paragraph as, “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself as king of England against the consent of the natives.” It was, he continued, “a paltry rascally origin. It certainly hath no divinity in it.” This was essentially the crux of Paine’s argument against the supposed noble origins of kingship. Far from being divinely ordained by God, as many of them claimed, they were nothing more than the descendants of, “the principle ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtility (sic) obtained him the title of chief among plunderers” (paragraph twelve). There was nothing noble in celebrating the brutal rise of a particular tribe, Paine asserted, and much to be gained in casting off their legacy.

Not content with levelling a stinging indictment at the origins of monarchy, Paine went on in subsequent paragraphs of the second section of Common Sense to describe some of the ills that kingship continued to perpetuate as of the 1770s. The first, in the sixteenth paragraph, concerns the way kingship acts on the minds of kings themselves. Often the undisputed lord and master of the territory over which they rule, it would seem prudent that a monarch be well-educated, worldly, and cognizant of the concerns of his/her realm and its many inhabitants. The underlying logic of kingship, however, creates a barrier between a monarch and the rest of the world by declaring them to be of an ill-defined but immutably different quality than the great mass of humanity. “Men who look upon themselves born to reign,” Paine argued, “and others to obey, soon grown insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are easily poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large.” How could such a person be expected to govern justly, knowledgeably, or effectively when they are ignorant of the reality in which the majority of their subjects exist? How could they act compassionately or rule fairly when they have been taught from birth that they are intrinsically superior to the vast majority of their fellow man? In Paine’s estimation they could be expected to do neither, and were more often, “the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

“Another evil which attends hereditary succession,” as Paine put it in paragraph seventeen, is the manner in which formal authority is given over to appointed regents in instances of infant succession or eventual infirmity. Because, generally speaking, monarchy transfers from one individual to another instantly upon the death of the holder it is not uncommon for minors, or even newborn infants, to be crowned a king or queen. Such was the case, to take an example seemingly at random, with Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1567), who ascended the throne upon the death of her father James V (1512-1542) in 1542 at the venerable age of six days. In such instances a regent, often a surviving parent, family member, or leader of a council of nobles, is appointed (or appoints themselves) to oversee the administration of the realm and exercise formal power in the name of their infant charge. A similar situation could and did occur in instances when an elderly monarch becomes mentally or physically incapable of ruling or is otherwise absent from the realm. Paine’s objection to this revolved around the accordant responsibility attached to the office of regent and the ample opportunities for personal enrichment that abound under the cover of acting on behalf of a ruler incapable of acting for themselves. Were it not bad enough that hereditary succession often places near-absolute power in the hands of those not fitted for it, a regency could potentially open up the exercise of this power to, “every miscreant, who can tamper successfully with the follies of either age or infancy.” To return to a prior example, young Queen Mary soon found herself a pawn in the attempts of Scotland’s Catholic and Protestant political factions to secure their place via alliance with either France or England. Her regents, neither elected nor even “divinely appointed,” ruled with their own interests in mind. This Paine found particularly objectionable, and plainly declared as much.

The third, and what Paine claimed to be, “the most plausible plea” against hereditary monarchy, he unfolded in paragraph eighteen of the second section of Common Sense. Monarchy, he wrote, was often claimed to be a force for political stability, and in particular to act as a guard against the outbreak of potentially destructive civil wars. If true, this would certainly seem to be a point in its favor. Its various flaws notwithstanding, if monarchy were able to preserve the lives and property of its subjects indefinitely it would seem to warrant no small degree of consideration as a useful form of government. As it happened, however, “the whole history of England disowns the fact.” By Paine’s estimation, the thirty kings and two minors that reigned between 1066 and 1776 witnessed at least eight civil wars and more than twice that number of rebellions (including the American Revolution). A cursory evaluation of the history of England within the indicated period reveals a multitude of civil conflicts that were likely the basis of Paine’s declaration. These include, but are not limited to, the dynastic struggle known as the Anarchy (1135-1154), the Great Revolt (1173-74) between Henry II and his sons, the First and Second Barons’ War (1215-1217 and 1264-1267) between rebellious alliances of nobles and Kings John and Henry III, respectively, another dynastic conflict famously referred to as the War of the Roses (1455-1487), the popular revolt know as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-37) which resulted from Henry VIII’s desire to reform the English church, the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). Lacking sufficient evidence to conclude that the English monarchy was the direct cause of all of these disturbances, which Paine appeared to intimate, it would nonetheless seem fair to conclude that the mere fact of the Crown was manifestly incapable of preventing them.

In this, and the previous two arguments, Paine’s central thesis was relatively simple. Namely that hereditary monarchy, apart from having its basis in the perpetuation of a contest of strength and cunning that has little to do with the qualities of good government, continued to produce a numbers of ills in its present (i.e. 1770s) form that were easily observable and measurable by the average person. He endeavoured to prove this point, as he did throughout Common Sense, by deploying simple logic and relying on the existing assumptions of his audience. Monarchs were distant, Paine wrote, and had little knowledge of the way their subjects lived. Nobles were untrustworthy, he argued, and would leap at the opportunity to seize power upon the succession of an infant to the throne or the infirmity of a reigning monarch. Civil war was common in England, he asserted, and even provided a tally of just how many times the Crown had failed to preserve the peace of the realm and contributed to the destruction of lives and property nominally under its protection. Absent access to a detailed sociological survey of the political biases and historical memory of the average American colonist in the 1770s (would that such a thing existed), I have little trouble believing that they would have responded well to arguments whose core conceits were simple assertions such as these.