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-18th 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.
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