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 18^th 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 18^th-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 11^th 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.