Common Sense, Part XI: Preaching to the Choir

Having provided a rather more exhaustive than intended rundown of some of the various concise and plainly logical arguments Thomas Paine deployed across all four sections of Common Sense, I’d like to turn now to another very important element of his rhetorical voice. Piety is that to which I refer, expression of which are sprinkled throughout Paine’s carefully plotted assertions. Indeed, I should say Protestant piety; Paine seemed more than willing to aim the occasional jab in the direction of the Catholic Church and its adherents. The shape said expressions took were many and varied; some as simple as a use of the word “God” rather than terms like “Providence” or “Nature,” commonly favored by followers of the intellectual Enlightenment. In other instances Paine compared his fellow American colonists to the Israelites – a chosen people best by suffering – made reference to concepts rooted in the Old Testament of the Bible like original sin, and showed a general admission to foundational Protestant beliefs like predestination, original sin, and millenarianism. These explicitly religious allusions, like his use of plain language and tendency to avoid abstractions, set Paine apart from most of his revolutionary contemporaries.

Though it would quite simply be untrue to claim that any member of the Founding Generation was a confessed or event latent atheist – they all believed in the existence of a deity in some form or another – as a group they tended not to express their faith in a particularly reverent or public fashion. In no small part because many of them were members of denominations that had suffered persecution under the Anglican Establishment in Britain, including Puritans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, and/or were followers of the philosophical Enlightenment, they more often than not supported religious freedom, believed in a customary separation between the public sphere of government and the private sphere of faith, and generally avoided unambiguously invoking God or quoting scripture in their published or spoken rhetoric. To that end, instances abound of men like Thomas Jefferson, John Jay or Alexander Hamilton using vague terms like the aforementioned Providence when referring to, say, a circumstance or opportunity that a more conventionally religious person might describe as “God-given.”

Similarly, use of the term “nature” as a way to describe an ill-defined, non-personified creator/regulator of human existence was frequent among those who either considered themselves Deists or who were sympathetic to or influenced by Deist ideas. Jefferson, for instance, referred in the introduction of the Declaration of Independence to, “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” Noteworthy here is the difference between using the term God on its own, which Jefferson avoided, and the phrase “Nature’s God,” which implies a fundamentally different relationship between the creator and its creation. A noted religious skeptic whose faith became at times a cause for criticism and suspicion among the American public, Jefferson, like many men of the Founding Generation, regarded the supreme being as a distant, theoretical construct who did not act in the world of human affairs, and whose role in the universe was limited to creation itself. Human existence, Jefferson believed, was best understood by studying history, philosophy, and logic, and by developing an appreciation for the basic physical laws of the universe (nature, if you like). Thus “Nature’s God” was not the activist deity recognized by most Christian denominations but rather a kind of engineer who, after creating the world and its inhabitants, set life in motion and allowed things to play out as they had been designed to.

Not every member of the Founding Generation, it’s worth noting, shared Jefferson’s or Benjamin Franklin’s (another noted pseudo-Deist) thoroughgoing skepticism in relation to conventional religious doctrine and practice. Though his later written work indicate a generally skeptical religious outlook, George Washington served during his career in colonial Virginia politics as vestryman and church warden in two parishes near his home. Charles Carol of Carrollton, delegate to the Continental Congress from Maryland, was a practising Roman Catholic whose faith barred him from holding office in his home colony, while John Witherspoon, delegate from New Jersey, was a Presbyterian minister and president of what would become Princeton University. What these men shared with their less-devout compatriots, however, was a generally academic, rational, and at-times philosophical outlook on matters of faith. Thomas Paine, as some of his later works would show, was most certainly of this opinion himself. Indeed, he was perhaps even more of a religious radical than Jefferson, who is known to have created an edited version of the Bible by extracting all mentions of miracles or the supernatural. As his controversial 1794 pamphlet The Age of Reason made clear, Paine regarded organized religion as hopelessly corrupt, the Bible as literature rather than revelation, and reason as the true foundation of human knowledge. As aforementioned, however, the voice Paine put forward in Common Sense displays a profoundly orthodox religious sensibility. Though seemingly at odds with his own beliefs, as well as those of the majority of his contemporaries, the pietistic tone that punctuates numerous sections of said pamphlet doubtless aligned with the deeply felt and highly personal religious character of the average colonial American.

The reason for the particularly devout nature of the colonial American population of the 1770s, excepting the more academic piety of the political and social elites, has to do with the long-term effects a series of events commonly referred to by historians as the First Great Awakening (approx. 1730-1750). An international Protestant religious revival, the Awakening began among English congregations in places like London and Bristol as a reaction to the charismatic, emotionally-charged preaching of men like George Whitefield and brothers John & Charles Wesley (between them the founders of the Methodist faith). Upon Whitefield’s arrival in the American colonies in the late 1730s he joined Massachusetts native and Puritan preacher Johnathan Edwards in delivering a series of extremely influential sermons, usually out-of-doors, in public spaces, and before large crowds, which proved extraordinarily popular and helped fundamentally reshape the American religious landscape. Edwards, educated in the Calvinist traditions of the Massachusetts Puritans, nevertheless endorsed a vision of the ideal relationship between God and the believer as very activist and immediate. Disdaining the traditional mediatory role filled by the orthodox clergy, he encouraged distrust among his audiences for self-proclaimed religious authorities and claimed that true revelation was highly personal in nature. To this revivalist foundation Whitefield added a rejection of standard Calvinist narratives of predestination (that some were simply destined for salvation from birth) and damnation, preaching that a person could save themselves by repenting their sins and wholeheartedly accepting the teachings of Christ.

Though criticized by many among the colonies’ established church hierarchies, notably resulting in a split in New England between traditionalist Old Lights and the reformist New Lights, the techniques employed by Edwards and Whitefield proved astonishingly effective at increasing church attendance and membership, and encouraged scores of spontaneous conversions. Countless preachers followed in their footsteps and helped spread the revivalist zeal of the Awakening to the backcountry regions of the Middle colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), the Tidewater and Low Country of the South, and to a significant portion of the millions of enslaved Africans toiling on plantations in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Indeed, the first Black churches in North America were founded during the years of the Great Awakening, acting as powerful forces for social cohesion and literacy among an otherwise severely disadvantaged population. Thereafter, Americans who had participated in religious revivals and who formed the nucleus of a score of newly-established Evangelical congregations came to view their faith in much more personal, emotional terms than their forbearers. Biblical literacy was widely encouraged, helping decentralize religious knowledge, and church attendance evolved into a much more active endeavour than in generations prior. One of the results of these developments was that, by the 1770s, Americans were among the most devout populations in the Western world; their sense of religious conviction was generally very personal, emotional, and introspective, and they tended to place a great deal of value in concepts like salvation and morality.

It was these kinds of convictions that Thomas Paine attempted to tap into over the course of Common Sense. By repeatedly invoking the name of God in a way that most revolutionary polemicist avoided, and by drawing upon his prospective audience’s personal connection to a variety of spiritual concepts, he sought to cast the burgeoning Revolution as an event with profound religious significance and independence as the fulfilment of a sanctified order. Examples thereof are generally less common than Paine’s use of plain reasoning or realpolitik arguments, though their recurrence across the length of Common Sense nonetheless lends a strong sense of tonal continuity. Keeping in mind that the previous ten posts provide a fairly thorough overview of all four sections of Common Sense and a great many of the arguments Paine deployed throughout, the discussion that follows will encompass an accordingly brief rundown of the various ways he laced said arguments with distinctly religious rhetoric.

As mentioned in weeks (nay, months) passed, members of the Founding Generation tended to be rather stingy with explicit invocations of God, particularly when compared to subsequent cohorts of American statesmen. Indeed, I recall (or just pulled up a second ago and re-read) that a sampling the State of the Union Addresses of the first three Presidents, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, turns up uses of the word Providence in nine out of twenty documents while the word God is completely absent. Paine’s Common Sense is comparatively rich with the latter, in fact reversing the ratio exactly (nine God to zero Providence) within a single document. Because they are so few I feel it worthwhile to identify each of them in turn rather than attempt a general summary as to their varied context.

The first is located in the twenty-first paragraph of the first section, wherein Paine argued that the power held by the British monarch was inherently dangerous. Said power, “could not be the gift of a wise people,” he wrote, and, “neither can any power, which needs checking, be from God.” In this case the Almighty was invoked in their traditional political role as the fountainhead from which all just authority flowed. A people whose self-identified relationship with God tended to be, as aforementioned, very personal, his American readers would no doubt had followed Paine’s lead and questioned the right of a British monarch to claim derivation of power from a divine source, the implication thereof being the existence of an exclusive relationship. All people, the First Great Awakening had led them to understand, were fundamentally equal in the eyes of the Lord; only their actions could determine their worth, the role they were to fulfill in live, and their fitness for salvation. The very essence of European-style monarchy, Paine reminded them, denied this commonly-held truth and was thus inherently invalid (if not outright blasphemous).  

The next two uses of the word God can be found in paragraph nine of section two during a lengthy discussion of the origins of monarchy among the ancient Israelites. Without going into great detail as to the nature and content of the explicit Old Testament references he therein unfolded it will suffice to say that Paine made use of the word God in describing David, the second King of Israel, as less a leader whose authority was directly derived from a divine source than as, “a man after God’s own heart.” Again, the personal nature of faith is what Paine seemed intent on drawing attention to; David was not a wise and just king (as he is often described) because he enjoyed God’s special favor, but because he personally aspired to it. This would necessarily seem to disqualify later monarchs, those presumably following in the tradition of David, who claimed a divine right to authority regardless of the un-Godly ways in which they often conducted themselves. God, Paine implied, did not favor kings outright so much as he favored those who favored him. The second use of the word God in paragraph nine appears to corroborate this idea. Having realized their folly in asking the prophet Samuel to appoint a king for them once the Lord had made clear his displeasure, the Israelites begged, “Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not, for WE HAVE ADDED UNTO OUR SINS THIS EVIL, TO ASK A KING.” God, Paine pointed out, was opposed to the very idea of kingship; those that favored it suffered his wrath, thunder and rain in a time of harvest, and were forced to beg his forgiveness. Described thus, Paine established God unambiguously against monarchy and the people foolishly and regretfully in favor. Being, again, a people whose relationship with the divine was very deeply and very personally felt (not unlike that of the Israelites themselves), this account of the ancient origins of monarchy doubtless struck many Americans – confronted at that moment in their history with either preserving monarchy or abandoning it – as a distressingly immediate cautionary tale.

At the end of section two of Common Sense Paine himself clearer still as to the adversarial relationship between God and monarchy in paragraph twenty-one of section two, stating, “'Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it.” There was likely little need to provide evidence as to the latter clause; monarchy, and often the succession thereto, had been cause for conflict among European states for centuries as of the 1770s. The Seven Years War, still very much in living memory, doubtless stood as a particularly vibrant example in the minds of colonial Americans of the kind of bloodshed competition between monarchies could, and did, engender. This, Paine intimated, was contrary to God’s will; if he approved of kingship he would not continually punish mankind by visiting the bloodiest kind of warfare so often upon monarchies. Paine further claimed in paragraph twenty-four of the same section, “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Notwithstanding his characteristically casual dismissal of monarchs as “crowned ruffians,” this statement attests yet again to the importance Paine attached, or rather that he perceived colonial Americans attached, to personal morality and personal virtue “in the sight of God.” To their thinking, value in the eyes of the Almighty – fitness for salvation – derived from acting and living well, in this case by being honest. Conversely, the Western European tradition of monarchy had come to understand rulers as ordained by God outright, regardless of how they behaved in life. It would seem to have been Paine’s hope that the deep-seated religious sensibilities of his audience would lead them to a consequent rejection monarchy as a concept and of the British monarchy in particular.

The following two invocations of the word God in Common Sense would seem to be somewhat more casual than most of those that preceded them. One, in paragraph twenty-six of section three, can be found amidst a lament by Paine of the apparent pointlessness of petitioning for reconciliation with a monarch who seemed only to grow more obstinate. “Wherefore,” he wrote, seeming to rhetorically throw up his hands, “since nothing but blows will do, for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats, under the violated and unmeaning names of parent and child.” Though this would appear to be an exhortation informally tossed off as so many of us would do in casual conversation, I submit that there was virtually nothing about Paine’s approach in Common Sense that was truly either informal or casual. Taken literally, this sentence declared that the independence of the Thirteen Colonies from British authority should have been accomplished for the sake of God; that is to say, because God desired it, because it would have fulfilled his purpose, or because it was in his interest. Thus, American independence, as Paine characterized it, would have fulfilled God’s purpose, or at the very least avoided an outcome that displeased him (i.e. war between “parent and child,” Britain and the Colonies). Having arrived over the course of the mid-18^th century at a general understanding of their faith as deeply personal, highly internalized, and concerned with self-improvement, morality, and personal salvation, Paine’s fellow colonists likely would not have passed their eyes over the phrase “for God’s sake” as lightly as a modern reader. Told that a potential outcome was for the sake of God, they doubtless would have seriously considered its implications and weighed for themselves where they stood on the matter. This, I think it fair to say, is exactly what Paine intended.

The next seemingly casual use of the word God in Common Sense is located at the end of paragraph forty-seven of section three. Said paragraph, and the three that precede it, concern themselves with Paine’s proposed outline for a formal national government to effectively replace the Continental Congress, and an accompanying constitutional convention. Having provided a basic rundown of how said government could be organized, how a “Charter of the United Colonies” could be arrived at, and what sort of matters needed to be discussed in the process, Paine concluded,

Immediately after which, the said Conference to dissolve, and the bodies of which shall be chosen comformable to the said charter, to be the legislators and governors of this continent for the time being: Whose peace and happiness, may God preserve, Amen.

By capping his proposed framework of a united American government thusly, Paine seemed almost to transform it into a kind of sermon. Just as a priest would bless his congregation at the end of a homily, in effect also offering benediction to the shared experience of church attendance, Paine blessed both the officers of his proposed national government in their endeavor, as well as the effort that would potentially bring said government into being. This apparent fusion of a republican vision of self-government with the spiritual weight of sanctified oration was likely intended to co-opt the significance of the latter on behalf of the former. If Paine’s fellow colonists could come to experience membership in a shared political community – transcending local or even state loyalties – with the same emotional, personal, or moral resonance as they did membership in the spiritual community that is a church congregation, American independence could have been ensured of a solid social foundation.

Further evidence of Paine’s attempt to combine the political and spiritual in a prospective independent American republic comprises his final use of the word God in Common Sense, found in the fiftieth paragraph of section three. Addressing potential criticism of post-independence America’s lack of a king, Paine declared, in what seems a fit of nose-thumbing pique, “let a day be set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING.” Putting aside the tremendous spectacle that this description calls to mind, it’s enormously significant that Paine advised the theoretical national charter to be crowned be placed upon “the word of God” before the deed was done. In that action the “divine law” and man’s law would literally touch, a constitution resting atop, presumably, a Bible, together to be declared the sole sovereign of the American people. Apparently content to throw subtlety out the window, Paine thus provided his audience with a vivid visual metaphor of the relationship he envisioned between law and liturgy in the nation they all stood on the cusp of forming. Going a bit farther, perhaps unnecessarily, I might even call attention to the arrangement of the two constituent elements: on the bottom, the Bible, providing a sound spiritual and moral bedrock for the new nation; on top, the constitution, a clearly written expression of the customs and norms of a free people, buttressed by the weight of the sacred knowledge that rests beneath it. A more powerful, and for countless American colonist in 1776 a more appealing, image of what an independent America could have been I defy anyone to locate. Though I again remind my own readers that Thomas Paine was himself a radical religious skeptic, his grasp of the spiritual sensibilities of his fellow colonists was arguably unparalleled and was put, over the course of Common Sense, to expert use.   

Common Sense, Part X: Strategy, and Forms Thereof

The last major argument for independence that Paine made use of in the fourth and final section of Common Sense was of a mainly strategic nature. Whereas he had previously advocated the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain as a means of fostering trade and economic growth, avoiding future conflicts, and establishing a more stable and more rational basis of government in America, Paine now sought to portray it as a tactical necessity. It was, he wrote in paragraph twenty-seven, customary in instances of war between two European powers for a third to attempt to interpose themselves between the conflicting parties in the name of mediation. If it was the aim of the rebellious colonies to achieve a desirable settlement of their own conflict with Britain, resulting in either autonomy, the repeal of certain acts of Parliament or a return to the status quo, such aid would indeed seem necessary. Such an eventuality, however, was unlikely to occur so long as the colonies continued to represent themselves as British subjects. By Paine’s estimation it would not do for, say, Portugal, to intervene in what was in a diplomatic sense an internal revolt originating from within the British Empire. There were, he declared, several reasons for this. The first was a matter of what might be called competitive advantage.

As discussed in weeks past, 18^th-century Great Power economics were based around the concept of mercantilism. Resources were finite, and strength came from concentrating them in the right hands while denying them to others. This sense of intense and intractable competition dominated high-level political and strategic military thinking as well. Every empire, every France, Spain, Britain and Russia, were pressing for advantage in every conceivable aspect of their existence. Colonies were one of the most coveted forms of advantage. In addition to natural resources – timber, produce, iron, and textiles – they provided manpower capable of being funnelled into the armed forces, valuable markets for manufactured goods, and hosted military bases that expanded the ability of the kings of France, Portugal or Great Britain to project their power across the globe. Indeed, wars were often fought over the possession of said colonies, and they not infrequently changed hands as a result of negotiated settlements. The Seven Years War (1754-1763), for instance, played out in North America as a contest between Britain and France over control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. That it culminated in the transfer of New France (modern Quebec) to British control – making the defence of the Thirteen Colonies much simpler – in exchange for France retaining the Caribbean sugar island of Guadeloupe and Martinique – considered at the time much more valuable commodities than fur-producing New France – is a prime example of the kind of strategic thinking that Great Power competition encouraged. Every empire sought to enrich itself and impoverish its rivals.

While it might thus appear on first blush that a revolt among Britain’s North American possessions would elicit immediate and enthusiastic support from the likes of France or Spain, every jockeying for advantage, Paine cautioned his readers in paragraph twenty-eight that matters were not quite that simple. If the aim of the American revolutionaries remained confined to a favourable re-establishment of the status quo ante bellum, a return to the accustomed relationship between the colonies and the Crown, then it was unlikely France, Spain, the Netherlands, or any of Britain’s European rivals would deign to offer assistance. This was, Paine quite simply argued, because they would have had nothing to gain. Though in the immediate offering aid to a rebellion against British authority in North America, perhaps helping prolong hostilities and giving their adversary a bloody nose, might have been to the advantage of the Spanish or the French, the long term results would have provided negligible benefit. Sooner or later the conflict would come to an end, negotiations would occur, and order would once more be restored to British North America. “It is unreasonable to suppose,” Paine wrote, “that France or Spain will give us any kind of assistance, if we mean only, to make use of that assistance for the purpose of repairing the breach.” Such assistance was certainly desirable as a means of establishing a strong position from which to negotiate, unless the colonists were content to surrender themselves to Britain’s tender mercies. Yet this much-needed military or financial assistance from Britain’s imperial foes could never be expected to materialize unless the parties in question could be assured of some kind of advantage. Independence, Paine believed, was exactly that assurance.

As aforementioned, 18^th-century Great Power competition was about denying advantage as much as it was gaining it. Assisting a newly-declared nation to secure its independence from British control might not have resulted in territorial gains for whichever European empire offered their support. It would, however, ensure that Britain would be cut off from abundant sources of manpower and natural resources, consumer markets, and valuable military posts. Thus weakening their rival, France or Spain could boast of gaining a distinct advantage over a hobbled British Empire. At the same time, the opening of American markets and American resources to foreign trade would have represented yet another, perhaps more immediate, reward to Britain’s continental rivals. Independence was the key, Paine asserted; it would turn onlookers into allies and former enemies into friends. Idealistic an argument as this sounds, it had the benefit of putting forward a very realistic assessment of the priorities of the American revolutionaries’ potential foreign supporters. It was entirely possible, Paine admitted, that help might be expected from abroad, but not without offering something in return. For a people who had a great deal of first-hand experience with the kind of calculating, merciless, acquisitive decision-making that moved great empires, and Americans in early 1776 arguably were that, this was doubtless a convincing argument.

Considerations of strategic advantage aside, Paine argued further in paragraph twenty-nine of section four of Common Sense that there was an additional concern that might have prevented Britain’s rival empires from jumping at the chance to offer assistance to an American revolt. As aforementioned, unless and until the Thirteen Colonies formally declared their independence from Britain the conflict between the two would retain the character of an internal revolt. Without making a clear and unambiguous statement of their desire to see themselves separated from the authority of the Crown, so went the logic, the colonies tacitly accepted their place within the larger empire. Other European powers would have thus been disinclined to side with the rebellious colonists for fear of the precedent it would have set. However eager France might have been to weaken their perennial rival Britain by propping up an American revolt, taking such a stance would have opened them up to similar violations of their own sovereignty; i.e. Britain offering military and economic support to a rebellion in Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). “While we profess ourselves the subjects of Britain,” Paine wrote, “We must, in the eyes of foreign nations, be considered as rebels. The precedent is somewhat dangerous to their peace, for men to be in arms under the name of subjects.” It would have been a different matter, however, for France or Spain to offer assistance to an independent American state, or more likely a collection of states, who possessed their own sovereignty and who had requested assistance in keeping with the legal and diplomatic norms of the era. No longer open to accusations of interference in internal British affairs, potential allies of the Thirteen Colonies could have asserted their right to conduct diplomacy and render aid to whichever other sovereign nation they wished.

Though this might seem at a glance to be a somewhat arbitrary, legalistic distinction, the difference between a colonial rebellion and a sovereign political entity was a very important one in the 18^th century. For the most part European civil wars that followed the era of the Reformation were fairly insular affairs. External interference was rare, and if a given conflict did eventually spill out onto a larger international stage it was usually after the rebellious faction in question had declared itself an independent, sovereign entity. Early precedents for this can be found in the history of the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the Eighty Years War (1568-1648). Though the former conflict represented a fundamental shift in the balance of power in Northern Europe, neither of England’s centuries-old rivals, France or Spain, offered financial or military support to either the Parliamentarian or Royalist factions. Similarly, during their lengthy struggle against the Spanish for an independent Netherlands, Dutch revolutionaries did not gain foreign assistance until after their formal independence had been declared and accepted by the Great Powers of Europe in 1609. The trend toward non-interference in internal revolts that these conflicts indicated was solidified by the termination of the extremely bloody international religious conflict known as the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the resulting Peace of Westphalia. So named for the region of Germany in which negotiations took place, it established for the first time a mutually agreed upon definition of state sovereignty and discouraged interference by sovereign states in each other’s domestic affairs. Combined, these concepts comprise what is commonly known as Westphalian Sovereignty. Intended to bring an end to an era of extraordinarily destructive conflicts between Europe’s Catholic and Protestant powers, the accord helped set the tone for later developments in 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th-century diplomacy, and forms the basis of modern international law.

Though I doubt very much that the average American colonist in 1776 was well-versed in European diplomacy, history, or law, and thus would have possessed a limited knowledge of the concepts inherent in Westphalian Sovereignty, Paine’s assessment in paragraph twenty-nine of section four of Common Sense was nevertheless apt. Legal and diplomatic norms in place for over a century would indeed have prevented any of Britain’s European rivals from attempting to interfere in the burgeoning American Revolution on behalf of the rebellious colonists. He was also correct in his assertion that a declaration of independence on the part of the colonists would render the issue null and void. This we can say conclusively because France and Spain did indeed seal alliances with the newly-minted United States of America in 1778 and 1779, respectively, following the formal declaration of American independence in July, 1776. Neither of these points in Paine’s favour, however, offers much of an explanation as to why he believed this particular argument would do much to sway his intended audience. Lacking in the main either a sophisticated education or the ability to peer into the mists of time, American colonists would have had little basis by which to evaluate the veracity of Paine’s claims in their finer points.

I don’t doubt that the average America was able to grasp Paine’s assertion that France, say, would not have deigned to spend money and manpower strengthening the colonies only to have them agree to reconciliation and once more add their newfound strength to Britain’s. Americans – merchants, traders, shipbuilders, soldiers – lived on the frontier of one of the world’s great empires; they doubtless understood, or at least had experience with, the kind of self-interested thinking that formed the core of European imperialism. That Paine also attempted to explain that independence was necessary in order to bypass contemporary legal and diplomatic customs, however, does strike me as rather odd. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish via its inclusion. I can’t imagine his fellow colonists grasping this argument very readily, lacking the necessary historical context, and thus it seems a strange choice for what is otherwise a popular appeal to commonly-held experiences, prejudices and sentiments. Perhaps I overestimate the ignorance of the 18^th-century American colonist, or underestimate the pervasiveness of some of the concepts inherent in Westphalian Sovereignty. Maybe Pennsylvanians and Virginians in 1776 had come to understand the principle of domestic non-interference as a given in international diplomacy. Either way, I don’t feel comfortable hazarding a guess. I am, I must confess, at a loss. Forgive me if this admission on my part shatters whatever image you've built up of your erstwhile host. I’ll give you a moment to recover.

Tum, tee, ta, tum.

Admissions of mortality aside, I will say that I chose to shine a light on this particular argument, baffling though it seems, for two reasons. The first is that it afforded me the opportunity to discuss, if only briefly, the significance of the Peace of Westphalia and its accompanying impact on European diplomatic and legal norms. I do so enjoy, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, drawing connections between the events of the American Founding and certain broader contemporary intellectual and cultural trends. That Paine made tacit reference to the post-Westphalian concept of domestic non-interference is important if for no other reason than it places the American Revolution in the appropriate global historical context.

So, there’s that. 

The other reason I wanted to discuss Paine’s rather highbrow diplomatic argument from the end of section four is because it’s not the only instance across the entirety of Common Sense wherein he appeared to depart from his calculated appeal to common prejudices and sentiments and reached for an idea or concept somewhat above the intellectual or educational level of his intended audience. Over the course of his best-selling pamphlet, in addition to drawing examples from the Old Testament or explicitly invoking God, Paine referred to English poet John Milton, British Whig politician and free speech advocate James Burgh, and Italian 18^th-century philosopher Giacinto Dragonetti. Even in our modern, hyper-connected, information-saturated world these men and their work are not common reference points for the average global citizen. Given how disconnected their lives tended to be from larger intellectual or artistic trends I subsequently have no doubt that their names would have meant very little when encountered in Paine’s Common Sense by the average 18^th-century American farmer or artisan. Thus it strikes me that either Paine found it difficult not to occasionally let slip how well-read he actually was, or that he was attempting to encourage his audience to discover Dragonetti’s Virtues and Rewards or Burgh’s Political Disquisitions for themselves. In either case, the impression of Paine to be gleaned from these odd and infrequent references to people or ideas likely outside the frame of reference of his readership would seem to be that of a man who tried, albeit not always successfully, to “dress down” his rhetorical style in order to reach as wide an audience as possible.     

On that note, I’d like to wrap this somewhat overlong post by making one last point about Paine’s use of rhetoric and language. Phrasing, concision and repetition were not the only ways he attempted to shape his readers’ perceptions of his arguments. Aside from affecting a plain-spoken rhetorical voice throughout Common Sense, and thus generally avoiding abstractions or obscure references, Paine was also not above the occasional crude allusion or turn of phrase as a means of appealing to his intended audience. Instances of this type are not frequent, it must be said, but the way they’re peppered throughout Paine’s various arguments seems indicative of the tone he was trying to adopt and the general character of the typical reader he envisioned. In the twenty-sixth paragraph of the pamphlet’s first section, for instance, he encouraged his readers to abandon any lingering sentimental or prideful attachment to Britain and its preferred form of government so that they might more clearly judge of the quality and utility of a plan for independence. Specifically, Paine stated that, “as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.” This is not, I think, a simile that would have ever found its way into the works of philosopher-statesman Jefferson, Puritan moralist Adams or even realpolitik strategist Hamilton.

I would say the same of Paine’s claim in the twelfth paragraph of the second section of Common Sense that monarchy arose in antiquity because it was very easy in ages past to make use of fables and trumped-up claims to, “cram hereditary right down the throats of the vulgar.” Similar turns of phrase can be found in paragraph fifty of section three, wherein he referred to George III as the “Royal Brute of Britain,” and paragraph fifty-three of the same, in which he questioned the ability of anyone to restore harmony to the relationship between the colonies and the Crown. “Can ye restore to us the time that is past?” he asked by means of rhetorical comparison, “Can ye give to prostitution its former innocence?” He responded, naturally, in the negative, stating, “As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain.” Though to a degree dressed up by 18th-century syntax and vocabulary the imagery conjured by these expressions is really quite visceral. Prostitution, rape, murder, throat-cramming; these are not the allusions favored by the refined scholar, statesman or philosopher, but the crude, vulgar reference points of the 18th-century common man. Along with his frequent use of pious language and Scriptural allusions, references such as these would seem to fall within Paine’s attempt to adopt a “common tongue.” 18th-century Americans were, by and large, not a people possessing delicate sensibilities; that Paine recognized this fact and tried to make use of it in his written appeal once more sets him apart from the majority of contemporary revolutionary polemicists.

Common Sense, Part IX: Facts and Figures, contd.

Having established, to his own satisfaction, the military feasibility of a challenge by the united colonies to the British Royal Navy and its various positive side-effects, not the least of which was a significant degree of economic stimulation, Paine thereafter considered in section four of Common Sense some of the other issues facing the Patriot cause that an unambiguous declaration of independence could potentially address. As before, the issues that he sought to address and the arguments he deployed were of a highly utilitarian nature. Rather than speak to theoretical violations of abstract philosophical principles, as did some of his contemporaries, Paine seemed intent on keeping the focus of his assertions sufficiently narrowed so as to apply to the everyday experiences of the average American colonist and the kind of knowledge they were likely to have acquired. The first of such arguments I’d like to draw attention to is covered in paragraph twenty-three, and concerns some of the lingering deficiencies of contemporary colonial government.

  Though he addressed Common Sense to the general population of all of the Thirteen Colonies then participating in the Continental Congress, Paine was himself a citizen of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, seat of colonial government, was his home, and he was most intimately familiar with that colony’s multi-faceted, multi-denominational politics. It should thus come as no surprise that, though he surely intended his comments be taken as a general caution to those living in any one of the thirteen, the particular example he cited was of Pennsylvanian origins. Specifically, he referenced a vote that had been held previous to the publication of Common Sense in the Provincial Assembly concerning the re-commissioning of the Philadelphia Associators. Organized previously in the 1740s and 1750s, the Associators were a voluntary militia force whose existence was first recommended by Benjamin Franklin, and whose purpose was to see to the defence of the city of Philadelphia in times of crisis. At the time the vote on their reactivation took place, Paine lamented, only twenty-eight members of the Assembly were present. Without knowing the total number elected it’s difficult to say how small a percentage of the whole this represented. That Paine found twenty-eight to be particularly distressing, though a vote still took place, would seem to indicate that this number represented a quorum, if only just.

Of those delegates in attendance, Paine continued, the eight representing Bucks County voted against the measure. Presumably it was not the case, based on how he phrased the following scenario, but in the event that a further seven delegates from Chester County voted against the Associators’ petition it would have been defeated by a count of fifteen to thirteen. In that case, Paine bemoaned, the fate of the city of Philadelphia, if not the fate of Pennsylvania itself, would have rested firmly in the hands of only two of counties. This is an example of what contemporary political philosophers referred to as the “tyranny of the majority.” Though twenty-eight delegates may have constituted a legal quorum, and though fifteen of those twenty-eight indeed constituted a majority, the democratic legitimacy of allowing fifty-one percent of the population to dictate to the remaining forty-nine was, and remains, highly questionable. The problem that faced Pennsylvania, Pain declared, was that there were a small number of voters, and a small and unequal number of representatives. Without a wider franchise the choice of representatives would remain in the hands of only a fraction of the overall population, effectively denying representation to certain economic and social sectors of colonial society. Without a larger overall number of representatives thin majorities were more likely to carry the day. In a group of ten, for example, a fifty-one percent (6-4) majority was more likely than in a group of fifty or one hundred. And so long as the number of representatives per county was uneven certain groups, say the delegates from Bucks County, could reliably dominate the legislative process at the expense of small county delegations. This, Paine argued, was something that an independent Pennsylvania, freed from seeking approval from either an absentee proprietor or a distant Board of Trade, could attempt to remedy though a more thoughtful apportionment of representatives.

Without knowing whether or not the kinds of occurrences that Paine described in paragraph twenty-three of section four of Common Sense were particularly common in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania, or if so for how long, a few basic facts and comments might help illuminate his point. Pennsylvania, as of 1775/76, consisted of only five counties: Bucks, Chester, Philadelphia, Montgomery and Northumberland. Bucks and Chester were the easternmost and southernmost counties, respectively, with Philadelphia occupying the banks of the Delaware River, Northumberland composing the western frontier, and Montgomery lying in between. Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Paine would have found the prospect of only two of five constituencies effectively governing for the whole (by 1790 some 400,000) somewhat troubling. It’s also worth noting that the charter of Pennsylvania in 1776, essentially a constitution known as the Frame of Government, had been last modified in 1701. It had remained relatively static during the intervening seven decades, and by the eve of the Revolution perhaps no longer represented the actual distribution of social and economic forces in the colony. Indeed, save for Georgia, which was established in 1732 and became a Crown Colony in 1755, none of the charters of any of the Thirteen Colonies had been substantially modified or amended after the 1710s. Though Paine spoke from specific experience with the political affairs of Pennsylvania, the flaws he observed doubtless affected more than just that colony. The colonial charters were notoriously hard to amend, most of them physically residing in Britain, and tended to require approval from the Crown before they could be changed or replaced. Without independence, Paine suggested, democratic imbalances like that which nearly torpedoed the adoption of a much-needed Philadelphia militia would remain largely intractable.

Though it may be impossible to say exactly how politically engaged the majority of Americans were in the 1770s, I think it speaks volumes that in a population of approximately 2.5 million Paine’s Common Sense sold something on the order of 500,000 copies and went through twenty-five editions in the first year of its publication. This made it far and away the most successful American work ever published. Clearly this would not have been the case had the pamphlet remained in the hands of an elite audience only. It would thus seem fair to conclude that Paine’s commentaries on, among other things, the flaws inherent in the political status quo, found a wide and receptive readership. It’s also important to recall that, though the majority of the overall population of the Thirteen Colonies were not entitled to vote in legislative elections, they were by no means stupid or uninformed. If they had been, the attempt at merging the governments of several northern colonies in the 1680s into the Boston-governed Dominion of New England would have succeeded. As it was, popular resentment boiled over into revolts in Massachusetts and New York that led to the disintegration of the Dominion and the reassertion of individual colonial charter government. The revolt in New York was led by a German-American merchant named Jacob Leisler; the Boston rebellion was centred on citizen militias whose core memberships were solidly middling. I don’t doubt that Paine was aware of these facts, just as he was of the numerous popular protests that had occurred in response to the Stamp Act and the Townsend Duties and the various demonstrations against the Tea Act, the most famous of which took place in Boston in 1773.

Americans had proven themselves by 1776 to be a politically-minded and politically-active people. The success of Common Sense, if not the fate of the Revolution itself, depended on it. Doubtless aware of these basic truths, Thomas Paine sought to speak through said pamphlet to the political consciousness of his fellow colonists. What better way to accomplish this than by shining a spotlight, not just on the larger questions of hereditary rule, international trade, or economic growth, but on the political grievances which most affected their everyday lives? Independence, he argued, could potentially provide solutions to a great many ills facing the Thirteen Colonies and their citizens in the long run. Attempting to prevent economic stagnation, for instance, was doubtless important to colonial Americans, particularly those engaged in commercial pursuits. But it was mainly a long-term goal whose fruits would not become apparent for some time, if at all. Allowing for much-needed alterations to the local political status quo, however, by altering the balance and composition of the legislative assemblies that did most of the day-to-day lawmaking that affected how people lived their lives no doubt smacked of a certain immediacy. This, I'm sure, was Paine’s intent; hit them where they live, as it were. By pointing to some of issues plaguing the government of his adopted home in Pennsylvania Paine helped demonstrate his own practical political awareness – no mere theorist, he – at the same time he demonstrated yet again how independence might positively affect the basic existence of colonial Americans.

Common Sense, Part VIII: Facts and Figures

Having already addressed the deficiencies of the British constitution, the shortcomings of hereditary monarchy, and the viability and necessity of independence in previous sections, Thomas Paine turned in the fourth and last part of Common Sense, weighing in at a respectable thirty-two paragraphs, to what I’ll call the “nuts and bolts” of a successful campaign for separation. Whereas in section three Paine endeavoured to convince his readers, among other things, that independence of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain was both a possibility and an imperative, the paragraphs that followed (under the heading “Of the Present Ability of America, with some miscellaneous Reflections”) attempted to weigh the same prospect in terms of the resources required and some of its potentially beneficial effects. To that end Paine deployed arguments that touched upon economic stimulation, demographics, and diplomacy, and even made use of a remarkably thorough cost/benefit analysis of naval shipbuilding. Independence, Paine seemed keen to get across by whatever means, would be a boon to the colonies. It could not be achieved without following certain steps and incurring certain risks, he freely admitted, but the potential economic growth it could generate, and the looming political crises it could help avoid, seemed to him well worth the cost. Doubtless he hoped his analysis of the expenses and profits of separation would strike the average American colonist – thrifty, hard-working, and risk-averse – in much the same way.

After again declaring, as he had on more than one occasion in Common Sense, that the independence of the Thirteen Colonies from British authority was inevitable, Paine began section four by exhorting his fellow colonists to take account of some of their material circumstances and decide from themselves whether his common refrain was merited or not. “Let us,” he wrote in the second paragraph, “in order to remove mistakes, take a general survey of things, and endeavour, if possible, to find out the very time” at which the colonies might achieve the necessary degree of “ripeness” for independence. Paine believed the present (January, 1776) to be sufficiently ripe, and attempted to guide his readers to a similar conclusion. The first circumstance he seized upon as being in favour of separation had to do with population. While, he admitted in paragraph three, no single colony possessed either the raw manpower or the proportion of adequately trained and experienced men to repel a British offensive on its own the thirteen acting in chorus presented an all-but insurmountable barrier to any attempt at subjugation. Indeed, the balance as he depicted it between success in unity and failure in autonomy seemed so delicate – “the whole, when united, can accomplish the matter, and either more, or, less than this, might be fatal in its effects” – that the creation of a Continental Army could easily be viewed as nothing short of an act of providence. Alone the colonies possessed no hope of success against British bayonets, and combined they were unstoppable; true or not, this would surely have struck many colonists as a powerful endorsement of colonial unity and further confirmation that independence was eminently possible.

Paine furthered his claim for the serendipitous demographic situation of the Thirteen Colonies circa 1776 when addressing their potential as a naval power. Because said colonies were, in the late-18^th century, nominally part of the British Empire, and because the Royal Navy at that time was virtually unrivalled among contemporary maritime forces, there had never been much reason for Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia or Massachusetts to develop anything more than shipping fleets. Britain, as of what is commonly regarded as the outbreak of the American Revolution in April, 1775, could thus easily outmatch whatever naval force the colonies might have been able to scrape together on short notice. This, Paine argued in paragraph three, would continue to be the case should the colonies agree to a negotiated settlement and return to the British fold; Britain’s naval power would continue to grow and future prospects for a potential American challenge would continue to diminish. Indeed, the process would be accelerated and rendered nigh-irreversible so long as American timber continued to be harvested by the British shipbuilding industry. This did not, however, need always be the case. It was possible, Paine suggested, while America’s resources were still her own, to create a native naval establishment set to rival the Royal Navy.

Population was on the colonists’ side. So long as American trade was hamstrung by British blockades, and it most certainly was, the resulting economic stagnation made for an abundance of unemployed young men doubtless eager to be put to work. The creation of a Continental Navy would do just that, at the same time it catalysed any number of other industries from shipbuilding to rope-making to the manufacture of arms and ammunition. This, it seems, was Paine’s “unified theory” of war, economics and population; “the diminution of trade affords an army, and the necessities of an army create a new trade.” This was a characterization of war, or as Paine explained it naval war, as a kind of economic stimulus. The creation and supply of a navy would help grow the economy, he declared, and the expansion of the economy would help support and increase the navy. Neither side of this equation could function, however, without first separating Britain and the colonies so that the latter could be permitted to flourish by making use of its own resources in the pursuit of its own goals.

Surely this seemed a tantalizing prospect to the many Americans whose livelihoods depended on access to foreign markets, and who had already begun to suffer under the effects of British blockades. There was, however, still the matter of the cost of a naval establishment. Without markets in which to sell their raw materials it would likely have seemed impossible to a great many colonists for their various provisional governments to summon the resources necessary to pay for ships and crews at anywhere near the level of the Royal Navy. Paine, unsurprisingly, had an answer at the ready. The actual cost of the British navy, he declared in paragraph six of section four, was in actuality far less than many in America might have imagined. Taking account of calculations made available by certain volumes on British naval history, as well as those put forward in the papers of Josiah Burchett (Secretary of the Admiralty, 1694-1742), Paine proceeded to enumerate exactly what those costs were in a set of neatly organized tables. Rather than replicate said tables here, which I don’t believe would be of great benefit to anyone, I’ll suffice with a handful of key extracts.

The total cost of building a ship of each designated rate (a category based on crew compliment and armament) was based, Paine explained, on the sum of her, “masts, yards, sails and rigging, together with a portion of eight months boatswain’s and carpenter’s seas-stores.” Within this framework he reckoned that a first-rate (100 guns) would cost approximately £35,500, a third-rate (70 guns) would clock in at £17,800, and a sixth-rate (20 guns) would consume £3,700. Taking these price points, and the various rates between them, as a basis, Paine calculated that the total cost of the Royal Navy at its “greatest glory” in 1757 during the Seven Years’ War was something on the order of £3,500,000.

This was, in 1776, a far from insubstantial amount of money, the prospect of having to equal it made all the more daunting by the relative crudity of the American financial sector at the end of the 18th century. Fortunately for the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies, Paine argued, they would not have to in order to successfully challenge the British in naval affairs. For one, he asserted, America’s natural resources and existing industries were already particularly geared towards shipbuilding. “Tar, timber, iron, and cordage are her natural produce,” he wrote. “We need go abroad for nothing.” Naval powers of the highest esteem like Britain and the Netherlands were blessed with no such natural abundance; they were forced to import most of the raw materials required to construct and maintain the fleets upon which their empires depended. The colonies could thus avoid the additional costs associated with purchasing the necessary implements at the same time the construction of a fleet would serve to catalyse the slumping American economy and help reopen avenues for trade. “We ought to view the building of a fleet as an article of commerce,” he lectured in paragraph nine, “it being the natural manufactory of this country. It is the best money we can lay out. A navy when finished is worth more than it cost.” Supplied with the requisite facts and figures, this was doubtless a forceful argument. Not only did it take a frank account of the actual costs of naval construction and supply, making use of data gathered by experts in that field, but it also spoke to the contemporary economic situation in the Thirteen Colonies and the skills possessed by a large number of their inhabitants. “Men of war,” Paine recalled in paragraph ten, “of seventy and eighty guns were built forty years ago in New-England, and why not the same now? Ship-building is America’s greatest pride, and in which, she will in time excel the whole world.”

Were this not advantage enough, Paine also set about deconstructing the myth of British naval invincibility in paragraph thirteen of section four by once more deploying concise, logical argument in order to sweep away what he regarded as ill-founded preconceptions. On paper, he admitted, the Royal Navy was indeed a force without peer. Its list of vessels was “long and formidable.” Reality, however, did not bear out its fearsome image. Less than a tenth, Paine asserted, of the ships on the British Navy’s active list were fit for service at any given time. Of those, many were virtually non-existent and had simply yet to be decommissioned. Furthermore, of those active vessels which were in a good state of repair and presently in service, something less than a fifth were deployed to any given station. The size of the late-18th century British Empire being what it was, Pain reminded his audience in paragraph thirteen, the Royal Navy was forced to stretch itself across a wide expanse of territory from Asia to Africa to the Mediterranean to the West Indies and North America. At no point could the entirety of the British Navy be brought to bear on a single opponent, and so its reputation for invincibility was thus something of an illusion. Americans, Paine chided, “have talked as if we should have the whole of it to encounter at once, and for that reason, supposed, that we must have one as large.” In fact, he continued, an American navy only a twentieth the size of Britain’s would be more than adequate to challenge the latter’s vaunted superiority. Not only did the relatively small size of American territory ensure that a prospective naval force could avoid being scattered and thus rendered of limited use, but the proximity of the Thirteen Colonies to the British West Indies would allow a locally-stationed and supplied American navy to cut Britain off from its Caribbean territories and thus deny it access to valuable resources.

As in previous instances in Common Sense, this was not a very complicated argument. Britain’s navy was very large, but its size was proportionate to the size of the empire it needed to patrol. Regardless of how highly Parliament may have valued the goal of bringing the rebellious colonies back into the fold as of January, 1776, it would have been effectively impossible – or at least terribly inadvisable – for the Admiralty to pull every ship from every station and send them to reinforce the colonial blockade. British possessions in India, Australia, and notably the West Indies that represented far greater value to the empire required constant protection; only a small handful of vessels not required on station could thus be spared. Basic knowledge of the scope of Britain’s global possessions and a glance at a globe would doubtless have borne this logic out. Paine’s earlier assertion, however, that the theoretical size of the Royal Navy was augmented by including unfit or non-existent vessels, required more specialized knowledge to fully grasp.

Allow me.  

Naval logistics has long been a complicated endeavour. Vessels that reach the end of their service life, either through sustaining cost-prohibitive damage or becoming technologically obsolete, are put through a process by which they are first rendered inactive before being decommissioned. During their period of deactivation, while they are being stripped of useful materials and their crew is slowly reassigned, they still technically retain their commission and thus continue to appear in formal naval listings. Consequently, at any given time a list of the commissioned vessels in a nation’s navy may not represent the actual number of active, armed, and assigned ships. Due to bureaucratic inefficiencies, incompetence, or the slow pace of multi-part decision-making processes in an era of purely analog communications, the Royal Navy at the end of the 18th century doubtless hosted a sizeable number of what might be called “ghost ships” that had been mislaid, forgotten about, or whose decommissioning had been delayed. For whatever reason Paine did not see fit to provide this information to his readers, perhaps relaying on those with naval experience – not an insignificant proportion – to understand and explain to their peers. In any case, the point itself is a valid one; speaking once again to the realities of naval administration, Paine hoped to show the Royal Navy for what it really was, and not for what so many imagined it to be.         

                  

Their opponents’ strengths or weaknesses aside, Paine seemed eager to communicate that the American colonies were uniquely blessed as to their situation regarding the creation of a navy. Few nations, he declared, possessed the manpower, materials, and access to viable ports in equal enough measure to make the creation of a truly formidable naval force possible. America, however, had been fated to possess all three in such ideal proportion as to make the absence of a naval establishment an unpardonable waste. As to the monetary expense involved, the size of which Paine did not attempt to deny, the colonies were again well-suited to bear the burden. This was because, Paine claimed in what I cannot help but think of as a harbinger of Hamiltonian rhetoric, the colonies did not possess the onerous financial responsibilities carried by military powers like Britain and its various rivals. “Debts,” he explained in paragraph five, “We have none; and whatever we may contract on this account will serve as a glorious memento of our virtue.” As Paine conceived of it, this put the colonies at a distinct advantage over Britain. While Parliament was at least partially constrained in whatever actions it took by the need to continually service the debts that had been acquired in decades past, the colonies and the Continental Congress operated under no such burdens. Their revenues, and whatever they managed to borrow, could be wholly directed towards the various facets of the war effort.

While this was a slightly wobbly argument – Britain having no trouble borrowing money at favourable interest rates and the colonies possessing no credit history to speak of – the way Paine summed it up speaks once again to his mastery of concise rhetoric and penchant for combining utilitarian and moral arguments. Whatever debts the colonies acquired in their pursuit of independence, he declared, would be well worth the establishment of a stable form of government and a sound constitution. If separation was not the ultimate aim, however, would it be acceptable to incur similar costs in pursuit of a favourable return to the status quo? “To expend millions for the sake of getting a few vile acts repealed,” he lamented, “and routing the present ministry only, is unworthy the charge, and is using posterity with the utmost cruelty; because it is leaving them the great work to do, and a debt upon their backs, from which, they derive no advantage.”

Though by January, 1776 the colonies had yet to take on even a fraction of the debts they would accrete over the course of the Revolutionary War, Paine already furnished his fellow colonists with vivid depictions of the abundant possibilities afforded by America’s virgin financial status and the crushing moral weight of allowing said possibilities to go to waste. To a degree, it must be said, this was putting the cart before the horse. War between the colonies and the Crown had been ongoing for less than a year, and a formal declaration of independence was another six months distant. These facts, however, did not serve Paine’s purpose. To realize what he knew needed to be accomplished, to lay the groundwork for a successful defence of American liberties and the creation of a stable continental government, the colonial populations needed to be propelled to action. Neither a philosophical treatise on the nature the social contract, nor a dry recitation of the pros and cons of continued British rule, would do the trick. Paine knew this better than most of his fellow revolutionaries, and peppered Common Sense  with an appropriate, and effective, mix of plain reasoning, utilitarian analysis and a distinct sense of urgency.                             

Common Sense, Part VII: Realpolitik, contd.

Section three of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, overall an exhaustive and at-times vitriolic compendium of all that was wrong with the existing (circa 1776) relationship between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Crown, combined with a brutally frank assessment of the prospects for reconciliation, concluded with some of the author’s thoughts on the viability of independence and what form he believed it might take. Again (stone me if you must) I feel the need to point out how capably Paine managed to harness simple observations and how well he seemed to understand what the average American colonist took for granted. Lacking the grounding in philosophy and history, the familiarity with classical Latin or Greek literature, or the fluency in abstractions that many of the luminaries of the Founding Generation possessed, most Americans lived in a world defined by pounds and pence, weights and measures, miles and acres, and, often, life and death. They were certainly not, as a group, unintelligent. The sense of worth they attached to this or that idea or concept, however, tended to be shaped by considerations of practicality over principle, if for no other reason than they had far more to lose than a classically educated and independently wealthy lawyer or plantation owner. Thus while independence may have appealed to many colonists, particularly when coupled with denunciations of the legitimacy of monarchical rule and recollections of the harm the colonies had suffered at the hands of the Crown, few would have agreed to hazard their all in its pursuit without some kind of assurance as to what its long-term result might be.

Paine understood how important it was to provide his readers with some sense of that it was either possible or necessary for the colonies to govern themselves at all. The latter he attempted to impress in paragraph forty of section three. The colonies, he argued, had seen to their respective affairs quite handily in light of the disruption brought about by the burgeoning Revolutionary War. In fact they had, he wrote, “manifested such a spirit of good order and obedience to continental government, as is sufficient to make every reasonable person easy and happy on that head.” To his credit the colonies had indeed, via the Second Continental Congress, managed to coordinate efforts to make known their grievances to Britain, seen to the formation and provisioning of a Continental Army, commissioned officers to command the same, assigned ambassadors to postings in Europe, established new trade policies, and begun the process of borrowing and printing the funds necessary to continue the armed conflict in which they found themselves entangled. Things were perhaps not as harmonious as Paine made them out to be, between regular squabbles in Congress and the refusal of certain colonies to lend money to the war effort, but the wheels of government in colonial America certainly continued to turn. What he did not make clear, however, is that the Thirteen Colonies were perhaps particularly well-equipped for self-government, and that the nature of how the Continental Congress functioned likely exaggerated any sense of consensus colonists in early 1776 might have perceived.

As mentioned in weeks past, the way many of the colonies came into being, as corporations, proprietary land grants or private enterprises, coupled with the sheer physical distance between them and Britain, ensured that a significant degree of functional autonomy was always an integral part of their makeup. The Crown formally appointed all of the colonial governors, save those of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, and said governors in turn appointed members of the respective colonial councils (legislative upper house) and courts. Most of the day to day administration and legislation, however, was carried out by the various elected colonial assemblies. This ensured that in matters of war, trade, and diplomacy the Crown, as represented by the governor, possessed the final say, while the colonists saw to their domestic affairs according to their own needs and based on their own timetable. Removing the governors, councils and courts from the equation certainly would have had a long-term effect, but in the interim it’s unlikely that the average colonist would have noticed the difference. Indeed, once a break with Britain began to look as though it was inevitable colonists critical of the Crown from Massachusetts to Georgia began to organize themselves into a variety of so-called “Provincial Congresses.” These ad-hoc bodies gradually came to displace the established colonial governments while still exercising most of the same powers traditionally held by the latter. This process of government formation doubtless succeeded, at least in part, because late-18^th century Americans were already accustomed to self-government. They were, many of them, experienced legislators, lawyers, merchants and financiers, and between them possessed the lion’s share of the knowledge required to successfully cast off British oversight. This, I think, Paine knew very well, and was right to point out to his fellow colonists in the spirit of reassurance and congratulations.

The foreign policy, trade, and diplomatic responsibilities formerly exercised by the Crown through various colonial offices meanwhile came to fall under the purview of the Continental Congress. While it was certainly not said body’s intended function, between 1774 and the early 1780s it gradually came to accumulate various duties in the name of overseeing the war effort and coordinating between the states. In this sense Congress became an effective stand-in for the Crown, as the theoretical highest-level legislative body whose decision-making power in certain policy areas all of the respective states (formerly colonies) recognized. Where Congress differed, however, was in its manifest inability to enforce really any of the measures it passed or collect on the requisitions it handed down to the states. Rather than a formal executive, or indeed a national legislature like the modern United States Congress, the Continental Congress was more akin to a high-level deliberative body. It functioned as a forum for debate among representatives of the colonies/states, was responsible for coordinating military and financial logistics, and helped present the image of a united front in terms of diplomacy and trade. None of the states, however, were really bound by its rulings. It was, for all intents and purposes, a voluntary body. This is not to say that the Congress was ineffectual, or that it failed to accomplish anything of note during its tenure (1775-1789). Rather, it’s simply important to understand that if Congress ever was effective it was because the states allowed it – nay, wished it – to be.

Thus, Paine’s praise of the harmonious condition of “continental government” in January, 1776 should perhaps be understood less as a tribute to the willingness of the states to cooperate, or the effectiveness of Congress, than as an acknowledgement of how lightly the authority of the nascent United States government was then felt. The Continental Congress served to provide a mechanism by which the various provisional revolutionary governments could discuss and form a consensus on this or that policy or strategy. There were few serious conflicts between Congress and the colonies/states because Congress had no mandate of its own to enforce. Paine’s attempt to praise the lack of disagreement between a purely voluntary body and its various members would thus seem to ring a little hollow. Or at least to me it does, gifted with hindsight as I am. What’s important to remember, though, is that in spite of how capable Americans in the 1770s already were of governing themselves in the everyday, administrative sense, and how little Congress demanded of the colonies/states, the belief that a break with Britain and the prospect of independence represented a metaphorical “leap in the dark” was almost certainly a common one. In attempting to convince his fellow colonists to take the plunge anyway, Paine no doubt felt it best to reassure them of how capable they were rather than how illusory their success might have been. While it no doubt would have come naturally to some of his revolutionary compatriots to attempt abstract reasoning or wander down some mazy avenue of Enlightenment philosophy in order to accomplish this, Paine instead attempted this act of reassurance simply by pointing to the state of government in the Thirteen Colonies as of early 1776. Taxes were being collected, ordinances were being passed, law and order had yet to totally collapse (away from the frontlines, anyway), and the war effort was being conducted with relative efficiency. What more effective advertisement for the viability of independence could there be? 

           

In asking Americans to potentially risk their lives and livelihoods, however, Paine knew that assurances of the viability of independence would not be enough. After all, simply because a thing is possible is no endorsement for it being necessary, or even desirable. No, if Common Sense was to move people to action it would need to make it plain that independence was not just an option, but the option. This Paine attempted in paragraphs thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine and fifty-one of section three. The arguments contained therein concerned the tenuous political and economic state that a settlement with Britain and a return to the status quo would leave the colonies in, the consequent likelihood of civil unrest occurring as a result of lingering discontent, and the chaos that might result from further rebellions of a less organized, less principled nature than that which Americans were presently engaged in.

What I’ll call the first and second of these linked concerns were addressed in paragraphs thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. Even a negotiated peace, Paine asserted therein, arrived at on the best possible terms for the aggrieved colonists could never hope to be anything more than a temporary postponement of what he believed to be a fundamentally irreconcilable conflict between the ambition of the colonies and the authority of the British Crown. What was best for the colonies, essentially, was not what was best for the empire. Consequently, a settlement of the conflict begun in April, 1775 at Lexington and Concord that once more placed the colonies under the authority of the Crown could only result in the emergence a state of distinct tension observable both from within and without. Protests against British trade and tax policies, already the cause of demonstrations in the 1760s and 1770s, would inevitably continue, met as before with harsh discipline and resulting in further recrimination on either side. “Emigrants of property,” as Paine referred to them in paragraph thirty-seven, would be disinclined to make their home in colonies whose political status remained distinctly disturbed, and take their wealth and expertise elsewhere. Just so could those present inhabitants who felt threatened by the uncertainty of American affairs choose to depart, further draining away the few material and demographic resources the colonies possessed. In such a state of despair, economic stagnation, and political instability, Paine asked his readers, was not further revolt a distinct possibility? And if that was the case, if further civil conflict and all the destruction of life and property it entailed was unavoidable under continued British rule, what was the purpose of submission? If Britain could not guarantee peace in realms nominally under its control, what purpose did being a part of its empire serve? Independence, Paine declared, was the only real option. It may not have been the answer to every problem Americans were likely to face, but it was perhaps the only permanent solution to the seemingly-intractable conflict between the colonies and the Crown.

This thread was picked up again in paragraph fifty-one of section three. Suppose, Paine postulated, that a settlement was reached between Britain and the colonies that once more placed them under the authority of the Crown. As aforementioned it was his opinion that such an outcome would be ultimately disastrous, but there were doubtless a sizeable enough percentage of colonists who still at least tacitly supported Britain in January, 1776 for him to admit that it was a distinct possibility. Under the terms of such a settlement, Paine continued, the colonies would once more be bound by British authority. Though in the immediate certain grievances might be laid to rest with the repeal of this or that piece of legislation, he seemed to doubt that the underlying philosophical, moral or logical complaints which had animated many of the revolutionaries and their supporters would simply vanish. In such a condition, with American political and economic life rendered unto a state of misery, and with the continued presence of discontent and bitterness among not-insignificant portions of the population, how long would it take for, “some desperate adventurer to try his fortune; and in such a case, what relief can Britain give?” As he had discussed already in paragraphs thirty-eight and thirty-nine, Paine was doubtful of the ability of Britain to adequately secure the peace in the Thirteen Colonies in the event of a further revolt. Should a second revolution come and British aid be too late in arriving, he prophesied, “the fatal business might be done; and ourselves suffering like the wretched Britons under the oppression of the Conqueror.”

What worried Paine, as much as the instability that would reign in America if British authority was reinstated it seemed, was the potential for a far less principled rebellion to occur over which he and his compatriots could exert no guiding influence. Paine feared the emergence of a “backwoods Caesar” whose ability to foment popular discontent and harness it in aide of their desire for power would surely bring about a tyranny ten times worse than that suffered under the Crown. While the example Paine deployed in support of this assertion might now be considered somewhat obscure, that of 17^th-century Italian fisherman-revolutionary Masaniello, the scenario he imagined is well-rooted in ancient and modern history. From Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte, charismatic demagogues have often enjoyed stunning success when attempting to direct the anger of an embittered population in order to seize the reins of power for themselves. Such an agitator, he suggested,

May hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge. 

That he imagined something of that description could take place in America is far from irrational, particularly if under a negotiated settlement with Britain informal bodies like the Committees of Correspondence or the Continental Congress were disallowed. Without such entities to channel popular anger into structured debate and organized resistance it would seem possible, if not likely, that un-checked mob violence could very easily be manipulated by a canny individual or group whose intentions were far from noble. This, Paine declared, was why the present revolution needed to be seized upon; “it is infinitely wiser and safer,” he wrote, “to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.” Though he would have preferred American independence to have developed gradually and with a minimum of bloodshed, the present conflict presented the colonists with an unparalleled opportunity. Their governments were being capably administered, Congress was overseeing the war effort with commendable efficiency, and the leadership of the Continental Army rested in the hands of men of proven character and ability. There could be, Paine endeavoured to impart to his audience, no better chance to achieve independence on terms favorable to American sensibilities.

            What is, again (again, again) worth taking note of about this particular argument is how Paine seemed not to address the prospect in independence in terms of its inherent moral or philosophical value. Jefferson, in his much-remembered Declaration of Independence of July, 1776, depicted separation from Great Britain as the answer to a series of infractions committed by the Crown that had gone unpunished, as well as a remedy to tyrannical government well-attested to by history and contemporary thought concerning natural law and natural rights. While certain of his more moderate contemporaries – John Dickenson of Pennsylvania, for example – might not have endorsed independence with as much gusto, they too tended to characterize the grievances between Britain and the colonies as chiefly involving concepts like justice, liberty, and the unspoken social contract. I have no doubt that Paine agreed with these men in large part, Jefferson in particular, but the claims he put forward in Common Sense in an attempt to gather the general colonial population into the pro-independence camp followed a very different line of reasoning.

Rather than endorse separation from Britain because he believed it to be a moral imperative, Paine spoke in terms of probabilities. If the Thirteen Colonies remained under British control, he declared, even a particularly favourable political settlement would do nothing to address the fundamental differences between them. That being the case, another rebellion was all but inevitable. Lacking strong, principled leadership such as that provided by the Continental Congress, what would prevent such a rebellion from becoming the plaything of the charismatic and unprincipled? This was doubtless seen as a compelling argument because of its immediacy; rather than declare to his fellow colonists, “We must seek independence because certain philosophical principles with which you are more than likely unfamiliar demand it,” Paine instead argued, “We must seek independence because if we don’t bad things will happen.” As effective in the hands of an 18^th-century pamphleteer as in those of a contemporary network-television polemicist, this kind of fear-mongering no doubt spoke to the average, business-minded, risk-averse American colonist in a very powerful way. The genius of Paine’s Common Sense, therefore, stems not just from the way it tapped into the desires or assumptions of its audience, but in how it tweaked their anxieties as well.