Friday, August 28, 2015

Common Sense, Part XV: the Radical and the Real

            With any luck this will be the last in what has become a terribly (terribly) lengthy series of posts about Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense. I thank my audience, as ever, for bearing with me lo these many weeks. Your patience is in every way the equal of your taste, and may I say that you smell very nice as well.

            Anyway…

            Before I sign off from this particular endeavour I’d like to discuss two final elements of Common Sense that I feel are important enough to receive some mention yet abstract enough not to have come up during my overly-exhaustive rundown of the same. One is the level to which Paine made use of particularly radical, nay incendiary, language over the course of his four-part political and social manifesto, while the other concerns the possible influence on said document of some of the philosophy native to the Scottish Enlightenment. I will dispense with these hopefully brief examinations...now.

            I recognize that I mentioned at the very beginning of this exercise that one of the things that defined Paine’s rhetorical voice was his abiding and often irreverent radicalism. Hopefully my examination of various elements of Common Sense has provided ample evidence of the same. That being said, I feel the need to emphasize one last time before parting how strongly said radicalism set Paine apart from his 18th-century contemporaries. Returning to some of the examples I deployed earlier, allow me to pull from Jefferson, and from John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767-1768) in order to show how the British monarchy, for example, was usually referred to in orthodox 18th-century American political rhetoric. Turning first to Dickinson’s Letters, which will be discussed in greater detail in weeks to come, one finds a tone of, if not deference then at least a degree of habitual respect. In Letter II, for example, Dickinson discussed the recent use, which he opposed, made by the British Parliament of taxes on goods imported into the colonies for the purpose of raising revenue. Throughout, Dickinson reserved the greatest share of his scorn for Parliament and its ministers. The King, who was referred to more than once, is by comparison characterized more as an important part of a large and complicated machine than an agent of causation or a source of ill intention.

            Similar portrayals of the British monarch can be found in Letter VI and Letter VII. Rather than excoriate monarchy in general, or even the British monarch in particular, Dickinson therein placed blame for the conflict between the Thirteen Colonies and the Crown on the shoulders of British politicians. The latter contained quite an explicit declaration of the same. “I do verily believe,” Dickinson wrote, “that the late act of parliament, imposing duties on paper, etc. was formed by Mr. Greenville, and his party.” Consequently George III was not the true cause of America’s woes; for, “As it is usual in Great Britain, to consider the King’s speech as the speech of the ministry, it may be right here to consider this act as the act of a party.” According to John Dickinson, or at least to his pen, partisan politics rather than monarchy itself or a specific monarch, were to blame for the imperial crisis that in the 1760s was threatening to tear the American colonies from their accustomed sovereign. While Dickinson himself may have disagreed with the way George III in particular seemed to bow unhesitatingly to the whims of his ministers, he did not say as much. In his Letters the British Monarch was still something of an august, if distant, personage, and was deserving of a certain degree of respect.      

            In contrast to the cautious and deliberate Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson was reliably among the most radical and outspoken of the Founding Fathers. He rarely seemed to hesitate before speaking his mind, and his historical reputation is arguably built on a series of impassioned quotations that often display more eloquence and zeal than good sense.  That being said, a degree of reticence seems to abide in his Revolutionary-era writings that prevented him from decrying monarchy outright. A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, published in 1774, referred with relative frequency to specific British kings with the respectful title “his majesty,” and in less specific cases used the same form of address on its own. Though it should be remembered that at the time of publication the Revolution had yet to begin, this still strikes as an unusually deferential style of reference for the Sage of Monticello.

            The text of the Declaration of Independence, as it turns out, is only slightly less courteous.  Therein Jefferson spoke of the “present king of Great Britain” as having overseen, “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” This is, in fact, the only mention of George III, and an oblique one at that. Though what followed was a fairly exhaustive list of the many and various ways the British Crown had visited harm upon the Thirteen Colonies and their respective populations, the monarchy itself, as a concept, is not really called into question. Indeed, the thrust of Jefferson’s argument, as discussed in this same blog many moons ago, was not a literal denunciation of all forms of hereditary kingship but rather an attempt to justify casting off the authority of one king in particular. By arguing that he and his fellow colonists were exercising their right as a free people to revolt against a government that had become unjust, Jefferson thereby spoke to a specific context rather than a general one. Presumably if the government of George III had been more favourably inclined towards its colonial subjects, and had avoided infringing upon their traditional rights and privileges, Jefferson would have had no cause to declare his and his associates desire for separation.

            As compared to these two men, among the intellectual guiding lights of the American Revolution, Paine appears as something akin to a schoolyard bully. Whereas Dickinson characterized the British monarchy as having been misused by corrupt ministers, and Jefferson seemed to find George III a particularly incompetent example of leadership within a system that was in itself theoretically sound, Paine spared no venom in attempting to tear apart and delegitimize the very concept of inherited kingship. “There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy,” he wrote in the twentieth paragraph of the first section of Common Sense, and thereby set the tone for what would follow. Over the course of said pamphlet Paine variously declared that inherited monarchy was the, “most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry”, that William the Conqueror was a “French bastard” and hereditary succession the parallel of original sin, and that George III was variously a “hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England” and the “Royal Brute of Britain.” He had, unlike his contemporaries Dickinson and Jefferson, no interest in being courteous or deferential to the British king. Nor did he seem inclined to excuse the flaws he perceived in the monarchical system of government as the consequence of poor political leadership or the flaws of a particular king. Monarchy, Paine proclaimed in no uncertain terms, was a corrupt, sinful, and manifestly illogical form of government under which no one could expect to live a life of safety and prosperity. It had been so since its inception, he asserted, and the only remedy for those suffering under its crushing weight was total emancipation.

            The disparity between Paine and his fellow Revolutionaries was not simply a matter of tone, however, but concerned a fundamental difference of methodology. Dickinson and Jefferson approached their work, and their audience, in a very elevated, scholarly fashion. They argued from a place of logic, laid out their claims in an almost forensic, evidence-based manner, and maintained at all times a restrained, unemotional voice. In many ways the literature they each generated prior to and during the Revolution are best understood as something alike to political essays. Both considered themselves educated, cultured gentlemen, and they accordingly approached the conflict between the Crown and the Colonies in a deliberative, lawyer-like fashion (fitting, since they were both trained attorneys) that sought to justify resistance in philosophical, legal and moral terms. Thomas Paine, conversely, was an intelligent, though only partially educated, middling bureaucrat and man of business whose origins were distinctly humble. The pamphlet he wrote in late 1775 and saw published in early 1776 in favor of American independence was neither scholarly nor an essay. Indeed, it wasn't trying to be either. Common Sense was a clear, concise, at-times visceral, irreverent, and emotional manifesto that sought to appeal to the gut reactions of its audience rather than their objectivity.

            Dickinson and Jefferson, the greatest 18th-century detective team that never was, attempted to speak to men of their own class in a manner that prevailed upon their sense of propriety, as well as any feelings of injustice. Both felt, in their own way, that their case against the British Crown was a reasonable one, and wished to give potential critics no excuse to characterize them as hysterical or irrational. Paine conversely let fly at first opportunity with extraordinarily vitriolic rhetoric whose purpose was to whip his audience into a lather and then direct them at an appropriate object of scorn. Some of them were almost certainly dyed-in-the-wool Loyalists, and were repelled almost immediately; perhaps an equal number were already of his opinion, and needed no convincing. Another third, however, were likely unconvinced either way. Maybe they had long suspected that monarchy was an unjust system but felt it improvident to say so out loud. Perhaps their sense of spiritual or moral propriety was irked somewhat by what they perceived as the manifestly un-Christian way the British monarchy carried on. Neither group, however, was likely to act on their own unless someone or something came along and showed them in no uncertain terms that they were not alone. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was almost certainly intended to do just that. By being outrageous, provocative, and oft-times slightly vulgar, he gave permission to others among his fellow colonists to cast off any lingering sense of propriety and embrace the cause of revolution.

            Cue the rising strains of Hail Columbia…

            As I pause to wipe away a tear I see that we've come at last to the final element of Common Sense I wish to discuss. As I think has become clear by now I do enjoy drawing connections between the events and in particular the documents of the American Revolution and their various influences and antecedents. During an early examination of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, I attempted to impress upon my dear, dear readers how much that documented owed to both the political philosophy of John Locke and the example set by the British Bill of Rights of 1689. The American Revolution, though in many ways an exceptional event, did not spring fully-formed from the head of Washington with all its intellectual underpinnings intact. Rather it was the product of centuries of colonial American history, European philosophical exploration and Western political innovation. In this same vein, many of the underlying intellectual sensibilities at play in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense can be traced back to earlier, non-American precursors. Specifically, the manner in which Paine seemed to depend on his audience being able to distinguish between good and bad propositions when phrased in a straightforward manner appears to owe much to the concept known to the Scottish Enlightenment as Common Sense Realism.

            Briefly, the Scottish Enlightenment was period in the history of Scotland covering the better part of the 18th century during which changes to the social, economic and political fabric of the country resulting in a flourishing of the arts, science, education, literacy, philosophy, industry, and commerce. Said changes were largely the result of the 1707 Act of Union, a piece of legislation accepted by the English and Scottish Parliaments which united the two countries and formed the Kingdom of Great Britain. What followed was a mass migration of Scottish politicians, aristocrats and ministers to the seat of the newly-enlarged government in London. Left behind were scores of lawyers and legal scholars, doctors, scientists, ministers, architects, philosophers, and educators who effectively took the place of the absent elite. Over the course of the following century they redefined Scotland as a major European centre of scientific, medical and philosophical education, advanced economics, and innovative engineering. Common Sense Realism was one of the products of this intellectual renaissance, and which bears the stamp of Scottish culture’s stereotypical pragmatism.

            Commonly attributed to the work of minster and doctor of philosophy Thomas Reid (1710-1796), historian Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), and mathematician Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), Common Sense Realism, or Common Sense Philosophy, holds that all people possess an innate ability to perceive and evaluate certain common concepts. This “common sensibility” forms, these men argued, the fundamental epistemological bedrock of understanding from which all philosophical inquiry could proceed.

            Not very helpful, right?

            Well, perhaps it’s important to understand that Common Sense Philosophy was originally devised by Reid in opposition to something called the Theory of Ideas. First described by French 17th-centruy philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), the Theory of Ideas, or Idealism, argues that reality is fundamentally the product of our individual minds. There is, accordingly, no way to determine the true or objective nature of the world because each of us are absolutely incapable of perceiving it outside of our senses and the mind that interprets them. A common, schoolyard exercise along these lines involves, say, the nature of color. What I perceive as the color blue and what you perceive as the color blue may not actually look at all the same in the abstract, objective sense. My blue may be your red, for example. Neither of us have any way on knowing this, however, because when asked to point to the color blue we will both gesture toward the same thing, and because we neither of us have the ability to experience the world outside of our own heads. This, Descartes and other Idealist thinkers posited, was potentially problematic, and entire schools of thought thereafter developed from this intellectual basis that attempted to grapple with the supposedly subjective nature of reality.

            Reid and other Scottish Enlightenment figures were unsatisfied with the level of abstraction Idealist philosophy seemed to promote. Indeed, they regarded the thoroughgoing skepticism of the Idealists as rather absurd, and accordingly sought to combat it by establishing a basis of common, consensual knowledge upon which to structure an understanding of experienced and un-experienced reality. This difference between these two, which I fear is not obvious, is that experienced reality is what we can perceive directly with our senses, while un-experienced reality is what we perceive “second-hand.” The house where I live, for instance, is an example of the former, while Paris, France (to which I have never been) for me forms part of the latter. Regardless of whether we perceive something directly or indirectly, however, Reid believed that, “there are certain principles […] which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them.” These principles, he declared, “are what we call the principles of common sense.” Because we are, as a species, incapable of perceiving reality any other way but via our senses, Reid argued that we must then take for granted that what we perceive is real and true. This is what is known as a highly empirical or scientific form of philosophy, whereby knowledge is rooted in experience and evidence and is thus subject to constant revision.

            This is, I understand, rather heady stuff, and you can be forgiven for speculating how it is I'm going to wend my way back from such a weighty and at-times obtuse digression. The reason I saw fit to bring Common Sense Philosophy to the forefront for the moment is because I perceive in its basic principles an acute similarity with the style of rational argument put forward by Thomas Paine in Common Sense. The practical, everyday implication of the Realism of Reid and his colleagues is that every person, regardless of birth, education or experience, possesses the same innate ability to perceive and evaluate the world around them. George III of the United Kingdom, for example, and a farm labourer from Worcester, Massachusetts could thus be said to hold within them the same inherent capacity to observe and judge the quality of an object, person, or concept. Indeed, the Realists stressed, this needed to be so for knowledge to have any objective meaning at all, and not simply evaporate in a cloud of abstractions once somebody began poking at the idea of my reality vs. your reality. Stripped of its larger metaphysical implications, this is precisely the same assumption Thomas Paine based so many of his arguments on in that most famous of American Revolutionary pamphlets.

            By seeking to address the common inhabitants of the American colonies, and by phrasing his many and various assertions in a plain, unadorned rhetorical style, Paine demonstrated a fundamental faith in the ability of his audience to understand and evaluate certain key ideas and concepts. The citizens of the Thirteen Colonies were not, he knew, a terribly well-educated bunch. But the capability he attempted to prevail upon was not the product of education. Rather it was a quality the Realists of the Scottish Enlightenment had earlier asserted was essential to human nature and the development of human knowledge. If Common Sense is any indication, Paine believed it possible to explain to an average American colonist in 1776 some of the more troubling implications of inherited monarchy and expect a reasonable evaluation in return. Said colonist likely wasn't well-versed in political theory or history, and thus to some might seem an unfit judge, yet Paine asked only that they exercise what Thomas Reid had earlier characterised as their inborn common sense. He asked, in effect, if it felt right that the ability of a given monarch to rule was essentially left up to chance, or if it looked right that the so-called defender of the people’s liberties was the descendent of a family of warlords and brigands. This invocation of this intangible but universally familiar sensibility is truly what set Paine and Common Sense apart from the great mass of rhetoric dispensed leading up to and during the American Revolution. Paine, by asking his fellow colonists to judge some of the implications of the Revolution for themselves, effectively helped instil in them the idea that their opinions had value.

            I will grant that I have no solid evidence to link Thomas Paine to Scottish Common Sense Realism. He did not explicitly invoke the names of Reid or his contemporaries over the course of Common Sense or cite any of their theories directly. It may, in fact, have been the case that Paine was personally unfamiliar with the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, and instead absorbed an appreciation for its base principles second hand. He was, after all, a man of limited formal education, and though certain of his arguments in Common Sense betray a surprising familiarity with European history and philosophy it would not seem at all unlikely for there to be holes in his knowledge. Be that as it may, however, Paine and Common Sense remain important examples of the transmission of ideas from Europe to the New World that is central to understanding how and why the American Revolution happend where and when it did. Whether he was aware of it or not, Paine was a conduit for many of the fundamental assumptions of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. However he became aware of the notion that all people possess a “common sense” which allows them to understand and evaluate the world around them, he put the idea to expert use when he argued in favour of American independence in early 1776. Thusly, aspects of an early 18th-century Scottish philosophical renaissance were transmitted to the people of late 18th-century Anglo-America, where they have since played their part in changing the course of world history.

            Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the reverberations of Paine’s attempt to place value on the “common sense” possessed by his fellow colonists continue to be felt to this day. Generally speaking, Americans do tend to place a great deal of faith in their own judgement, and can accordingly be quite hostile to the pronouncements of those identified as “experts” in a given field. This has manifested in a variety of ways, from the at-times aggressive economic and political democratisation that occurred in the 1820s and 1830s, to the anti-intellectualism of the 1950s, to the post-Great Recession populism of the present day. I don’t doubt in the slightest that the rise of the some of the more stridently individualist elements of the American identity are due to a more complex set of factors than the influence of a single, early piece of political propaganda. Nonetheless, I cannot help but perceive in Common Sense, one of the best-selling American titles ever, the seeds of the abiding self-possession that in many ways has come to define America and Americans to the larger world. Of course, whether or not Thomas Paine helped set the development of that particular element of the American self in motion is likely impossible to determine.

            Still, it is worth thinking about.

            Before I sign off I’d like to thank the small band of apparently dedicated readers who seem to check in on my work week after week with relative consistency. You happy few have become a source of elation and terror on my part, and your patience with my interminable ramblings is very much appreciated. I'm sure that this last series of posts was not the break you were hoping for after the epic poem I tossed off about banking, of all things, but so it goes. It turned out that I had a great deal to say about Thomas Paine and his take on all things common and sensible. In my defence, forty pages of revolutionary pamphleteering makes for much clay and very many bricks. With any luck the next few weeks will witness a return to a slightly more…digestible…format.

            Of course, for those of you who care about this sort of thing, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense:  http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Common_Sense

Friday, August 21, 2015

Common Sense, Part XIV: Preaching to the Choir, contd.

Turning to paragraph nineteen of section three, Paine therein seemed to hint in the direction of the providential or predestined nature of American independence. A continued connection between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain, he argued, would inevitably and to no good effect drag the American colonists into one conflict after another in whose successful conclusion they had little to gain and much to lose. American trade in particular, the cornerstone of an economy dependent on the importation of manufactured goods in the absence of native industry, was most likely to suffer in the event of war between the British and one of their various Great Power rivals whether said conflict had anything to do with Britain’s American territories or not. This, Paine asserted, was best understood as a signifier of how ill-suited the two regions were, Europe and North America, to exist in a relationship of mutual dependence. Indeed, he wrote, “The distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven.” Thusly, Paine was able to transition from an argument seemingly against the logic of two distant territories possessing such an intimate relationship to one that speculated whether the continuation of said relationship wasn't a violation of God’s manifest will. This was, to his credit, smoothly done, and tapped expertly into the aforementioned millenarian strain of thought present in 18th-century American Protestantism.

What Paine claimed to have an interest in, and no doubt believed his audience would as well, was “the design of Heaven.” This ineffable master plan, the details of which were generally understood to be beyond human comprehension, nonetheless exerted a strong influence on Christian, and in particular Protestant, thought. If it was the manifest design of the Almighty that America be a world unto itself, untethered from allegiance to any other region of the globe, then it would have followed that the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from British hegemony constituted a furtherance of the selfsame hallowed manifesto. Paine’s audience was likely well-primed to recognize and respond to arguments such as this. Rhetoric had often been deployed by members of the American colonies’ various religion communities over the centuries between the beginning of the colonial era and the 1770s that contained numerous allusions to the New World as a kind of “promised land,” religious refuge, or the site of a general social and/or historical regeneration. Even among the members of the colonies’ educated classes, who had generally moved away from adherence to orthodox religion and embraced some form of the European Enlightenment’s spiritual rationalism, there were those who found it difficult to resist characterizing the burgeoning American civilization as one ideally suited, if not destined, for a degree of social and philosophical perfection not possible in arch-traditionalist Europe.

Paine was very wise to recognize this tendency in American religious and philosophical thought, and appears to have buttressed many of his arguments with allusions to the inevitability of American independence, the importance of recognizing and following one’s destiny, and the special place that America supposedly occupied in the history of Western civilization. Events, he time and again declared, had appeared to conspire to place the American continent in a unique position. At the bottom of the abovementioned paragraph nineteen, Paine made the particularly weighty observation that, “the Reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship not safety.” There are, I think, two things about this claim of Paine’s that are particularly worthy of consideration. One is the way it reinforces an understanding of history as being a function of the Christian God’s ordering of events in a specific sequence. In the predestination/millennialism-tinged Protestant view of human existence, one thing happens after the other for a reason, and all things are leading towards a predetermined end. When Paine speculated that the Reformation (beginning in 1517) was preceded by the discovery of the Americas (beginning in 1492) in order so that the latter region could serve as a refuge for the soon-to-be persecuted Protestant faithful he effectively endorsed this perception of history. It perhaps follows, given the numerous instances over the course of Common Sense in which Paine made note of the inevitable nature of American independence, that he regarded a separation between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain to be the next major event in God’s immutable design. This interpretation of Paine’s intention is, I think, reinforced by the second element worth noting about his aforementioned paragraph nineteen millennial allusions.

Paine’s mention of the Reformation, America as a religious sanctuary, and the persecuted being forced to flee their homes in Europe was not, I think, incidental to his overall purpose. As previously discussed, by the 1770s many of the Thirteen Colonies were populated by the descendants of exactly those religious refugees that Paine described in, and was now addressing with the publication of, Common Sense. The Puritans of New England, the Baptists of Rhode Island, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the Catholics of Maryland were all members of religious denominations that had been effectively barred from holding significant political authority under the British Anglican Establishment. Indeed, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maryland were all originally envisioned as religious refuges by their founding patrons. The offspring of the original populations of said colonies continued to be acutely conscious of their origins in religious persecution well into the 1770s, and this accordingly shaped their perceptions of what their purpose (some might even say destiny) in America was. A common manifestation thereof was a belief in eventual validation; that exile in the New World would eventually lead to the creation of a purer, more glorious, and more godly society than would have been possible in orthodox European climes. Paine seemed to have recognized the existence of such sentiments in his audience, and structured his arguments in favor of independence so as to tap into their variously manifested sense of persecution, vindication, and destiny.

Paine referred to the providential nature of America’s perceived status as a religious refuge again in paragraph twenty-one of section four of Common Sense. Among the roles he envisioned a proper government ought to possess he asserted that the only religious duty a republican regime should undertake was the paramount protection of freedom of conscience. This state of affairs, he continued, would have been easier to achieve in America than in other regions of the globe thanks to the abiding religious diversity of the colonies and their distinctly heterogeneous populations. Indeed, he wrote, “I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty, that there should be a diversity of religious opinions among us.” Such diversity, he claimed, “affords a larger field for out Christian kindness,” and would have provided, unlike in a society united by single faith, greater opportunity for continued questioning, debate, and spiritual regeneration. In this instance, as in other already noted, Paine seemed to quite effectively tap into several strains of religious thought present among his 18th-century American Protestant audience. The most obvious is evidenced by his willingness to attribute a manifest circumstance of life in the colonies – their religious diversity – to the guiding hand of the Almighty. This, he effectively declared, was not a mere quirk of history but the direct consequence of God’s ultimate design. His fellow colonists, it followed, would have done well to embrace their diversity, and thus embrace the dictates of providence.

By exhorting his American readers to embrace their abiding religious diversity Paine also appeared to validate their status as refugees from oppression in Europe. If the American continent was indeed ordained by God to be a haven for the persecuted, as Paine claimed it was, it then followed that the communities, be they Quakers, Baptists, Puritans or Catholics, who had settled therein had not suffered in vain. Indeed, their loss of home, property, livelihood, and exile in a strange and at-times threatening wilderness were all a part of God’s age-old plan to create a more perfect human society and thus hasten the coming of the millennium. This was doubtless an appealing notion to American Protestants, be they Post-Millennial or Pre-Millennial adherents. The suffering they and their forbearers had endured was entirely purposeful, and its eventual reward would be the creation of a new, stronger, more pious social body that would lead the world into a new age of peace and prosperity. The method by which this would be accomplished is where Paine looped back to his overarching thesis.

Persecution and disenfranchisement under the Anglican Establishment in Britain is what drove countless people in the 17th and 18th centuries to depart their homes in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and risk their all by settling in what we now recognize as the Thirteen Colonies. The religious conflict at the heart of this migration continued to color the relationships between the various colonies and the British Crown throughout the colonial era, and played a far-from-insignificant role in nurturing an abiding sense of antipathy between the colonists and their British cousins in the years leading up to the beginning of the Revolution. Though the First Great Awakening did a great deal to revitalize American Protestantism in its various manifestations on an individual level, many non-Anglican colonists still found themselves living under a political order that was dominated by the influence of the Anglian Church and its hierarchy. Thomas Paine, perceptive as he was, recognized this, remarked that America’s religious diversity was in fact God-ordained, and offered a potential solution for its inability to be fully and freely expressed. Independence of the colonies from Britain, for which he had argued from any number of angles, could as well help bring about an era of religious freedom in America more in keeping with the manifest will of the Almighty. This, again, could not have but appealed to American colonists who had been forced to reconcile their faith with that of the monarch whose sovereignty over them they nominally acknowledged. George III was, after all, the head of the Anglican Church, and the governors he regularly appointed to administer the colonies that fell directly under his authority were of the selfsame faith (lest they be disqualified from holding any office). Yet, Paine intimated, freedom to worship, to hold public office, or to structure their governments in a way that did not offend the dignity of their faith was within the grasp of all Americans. Independence was the thing, and thus the author of Common Sense strengthened his argument in its favor.

As I've nearly come to the end of this particular post I’d like to offer a minor caveat to the image I believe I've painted herein of Paine using religious diversity as a hook and a prize in his arguments in favor of independence. I recognize that, looking back, I often included Catholics in amongst those disenfranchised Christians to whom Paine was attempting to appeal. I did this because I believe the arguments he put forward did indeed apply to those few 18th-century American followers of the Roman Catholic Rite as they did to the much larger number of Congregationalists, Quakers, Baptists, and various other of what were known in Anglican England as Protestant Dissenters then living in the American colonies. I would be remiss, however, in not pointing out that one of the ways Paine appealed to the sympathies of his mainly Protestant audience was by manifesting a casual disdain of Roman Catholicism.

The sentiment in question is not one which pervades Common Sense from top to bottom, but it is there. At the end of the ninth paragraph of section two, which if you recall contains a lengthy meditation on the origins of kingship among the Children of Israel, Paine concluded that the practice of monarchs withholding information as to the lack of scriptural basis for their rule made them akin to priests in “Popish countries.” This was a blatant criticism, as old as the Reformation itself, aimed at the custom of Catholic priests to act as intermediaries between their congregation and the text of the Bible. “Monarchy,” Paine thusly declared, “in every instance is the Popery of government.” Further on, in the lengthy third section of Common Sense, Paine argued in the eleventh paragraph that the concept of Britain as the parent or mother country of the colonies was a fundamentally false one, and had been “jesuitically adopted by the king and his parasites, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds.” This again demonstrates Paine’s willingness to harness the antipathy felt among Protestants of just about any stripe for the Roman Catholic Church and its reputation for power-brokering and cynical manipulation.

In addition to demonstrating how far Paine was willing to go to adopt a tone of pious Protestantism with Common Sense, to the point of appearing to prey upon the faith’s accustomed theological adversary, his use of anti-Catholic slurs helped to set his rhetoric apart from that of his more self-consciously academic contemporaries. By and large, as I hope I've managed to get across, the Founding Fathers were a religiously diverse and generally quite tolerant group. Freedom of conscience is what they advocated, evidenced by their words as well as the fact that they included a prominent Maryland Catholic, Charles Carrol of Carrolton, among their number. Paine, as his later work indicates, was of this opinion as well, or at the very least was not one to celebrate or denigrate any one particular religious faith. The majority of the citizens of the American colonies, however, were somewhat less diffident. However much they and their forefathers had suffered under the overbearing hegemony of the Anglican Establishment, it had been hammered into them by generations of Protestant preachers, educators, and political leaders that Catholicism was the unequivocal enemy. It was the religion of France and Spain, their ancestral enemies; a faith outwardly defined by a meddlesome Pope, grasping Cardinals, rigid hierarchy, unquestioning deference, and dogmatic narrow-mindedness. In many ways Roman Catholicism was to the average 18th-century Protestant what Islam is to the modern citizen of the Western world; a mysterious, vaguely threatening, and rigidly traditionalist faith whose adherents cannot be reasoned with. Though the 18th-century Protestant perception of Catholics was often as shallow and misguided as modern misconceptions surrounding Muslims in the West, such emotional biases lent themselves to skilled rhetorical manipulation. This, Thomas Paine knew and this, Thomas Paine attempted; to what degree of success is a matter of speculation.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Common Sense, Part XIII: Preaching to the Choir, contd.

In addition to making use of explicit invocations of the term “God,” alluding at length to the history of the ancient Israelites as recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible, and inserting occasional references to Satan, Lucifer, and the Pharaohs of the Book of Exodus, Paine also made rhetorical use in Common Sense of intermittent suggestions or citations of certain abstract concepts that were, and remain, fundamental to Protestant Christianity. Once again, these instances likely served the dual purpose of both demonstrating the piety of the author in the hope of engendering trust with his audience, as well as attempting to direct the at-times highly personal and emotional reverence the great majority of colonial Americans felt toward God and the Bible against the British Crown and any potential reconciliation therewith. They also seem, upon consideration, to show that Paine possessed a particular understanding of the aspects of Christian theology to which 18th-century colonial Americans attached the greatest significance. More than a retelling of the stories of Gideon or Samuel, or even direct admissions to the primacy of the will of God, Paine’s attempts to speak to the specific religious perspective embraced by most of the post-Great Awakening population of the American colonies likely helped demonstrate that the author of Common Sense was a trustworthy co-religionist and not simply a self-interested interloper.

To that end, Paine first made overt reference in paragraph fourteen of section two of Common Sense to what he suggested was the obvious relationship between hereditary monarchy and original sin. Kingship, he asserted, could only have emerged in its earliest form in one of three ways: by lot (at random from a pre-selected group), by election (on an at-least semi-democratic basis), or by usurpation (as in some form of coup). The manner first exercised would naturally seem to set a precedent for subsequent instances; i.e. if at first a monarch is elected it would seem logical that a second election should follow in the event of their death or abdication. All hereditary monarchies, of which the 18th century was cheek-to-jowl, must have started in one of these three ways and at some point deviated into the more familiar mode of inherited authority. This, Paine argued, constituted a grave misfortune, for it effectively served to rob the people to be ruled in subsequent generations of the fundamental freedom of choice enjoyed by their predecessors. To make use of what I hope is an apt example, a theoretical group of Anglo-Saxon warlords may have, in far-distant antiquity, selected from amongst themselves he who would serve as their sovereign overlord, thus giving rise to the Kingdom of England. Said warlords, Paine doubtless would have agreed, were perfectly within their rights to delegate a portion of their individual sovereignty in the name of centralizing the administration and security of their combined holdings. Trouble arose, however, when at some point between that distant origin and the 18th-century the English Crown became the legal possession of a single family line. The descendants of those same venerable warlords, though potentially still blessed with wealth and privilege, would thus have lost the right to choose their liege as their forbearers had done through no particular action or transgression of their own.

To Paine’s view, or so he argued, the loss of the ability of the ruled to choose their ruler that hereditary monarchy entailed made it strikingly similar to the Biblical concept of original sin. “The right,” he wrote to that effect, “of all future generations is taken away, by the act of the first electors, in their choice of not only a king, but of a family of kings for ever, hath no parallel in or out of scripture but the doctrine of original sin, which supposes the free will of all men lost in Adam.” By a simple transgression, brought about by his own mortal weakness, the Biblical progenitor of man doomed his race in perpetuity to an existence of suffering, deprivation, and permanent exile from paradise. Just so, Paine argued, the progenitors of monarchy looked to their own personal priorities and anointed a family line that would continue to rule their own descendants, theoretically for all time, whether the monarch of the day be fit for the task or not. “As in Adam all sinned,” he wrote, “and as in the first electors all men obeyed; as in the one all mankind were subjected to Satan, and in the other to Sovereignty; as our innocence was lost in the first, and our authority in the last.” Striking here is Paine’s assertion that living under a hereditary monarchy was the worldly equivalent of continuously being subject to the influence of Satan, both a collective punishment for a singular error. Yet, though man would always bear the burden of original sin he need not forever suffer under the yoke of inherited kingship, and therein lay the strength of Paine’s rhetorical construction.

At the very heart of the idea of original sin is a sense of loss. Adam’s choice led humanity down a path other than what God originally intended. Had he chosen to reject temptation mankind might have remained in the Garden and enjoyed an endless existence of peace, prosperity and joy. Along with this sense of loss, however, there would seem to be an accompanying sense of resignation or finality. However much humanity may labour to attain salvation, they may only find paradise in death; the earthly garden is closed to them forever. Though as Paine described it hereditary monarchy was similar to original sin in its basic origins, it was unalike in its most fundamental implication. Where the penalty for original sin was absolutely irrevocable, the punishment to be suffered by subsequent generations for their progenitors’ crime of having embraced monarchy was not. History is awash with examples of civilizations, from ancient Rome to the 17th-century Dutch to the Roundheads of the English Civil War, who cast off longstanding hereditary monarchies and embraced some form of republican government. Though inherited monarchy may have been, as Paine argued, inherently sinful in character, people clearly need not have suffered under it indefinitely. Indeed, the realization that acknowledging the authority of a hereditary ruler was tantamount to embracing the Biblical fall of man was likely intended as an exhortation to the contrary. Americans need only seized hold of their destinies with both hands and throw aside the “royal brute of Britain” in order to right an ancient wrong, the only equal of which was the paramount wrong the Bible records as forming the root of human weakness. As, once again, a generally pious, Bible-reading, church-going population the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies likely felt this to be a difficult proposition to ignore. Original sin may have been forever beyond their reach to undo, but as Paine explained in Common Sense banishing hereditary monarchy was the next best thing.

Similarly fundamental in its likely appeal was Paine’s apparent attempts in Common Sense to subtly invoke the concepts of predestination and millenarianism. These are both somewhat heady notions, it must be said, and the average 21st-century American Protestant likely doesn’t encounter them as often in the course of their religious life as their 18th-century counterparts did. For the citizens of 1770s colonial America, heirs to the legacy of the First Great Awakening, these concepts were absolutely fundamental to how they understood their faith, their place in the world, the role of salvation, and the purpose of life on earth. Predestination is perhaps most strongly expressed and embraced by the Calvinist churches, and holds that every person is predestined, based on God’s knowledge alone, for either salvation or damnation. Human action has no impact on the fate of an individual soul; salvation comes by the grace of God alone, rather than as a reward for the good works accomplished in life. It follows, in the orthodox conception, that a person who attempts to live well, aides their fellow man, is charitable, compassionate, etc… does so not in an attempt to earn salvation, but because they were clearly destined for it all along. Among the Congregationalist churches of  colonial New England and New York, members of the larger Calvinist doctrinal community, the primacy of predestination exerted a profound spiritual, social and psychological effect on generations of colonists, and subsequently helped shape the cultural, philosophical and political outlooks of countless American statesmen, soldiers, merchants, and artists.

Millenarianism, or in the Christian context millennialism, is generally understood as a belief in the inevitable transformation of society in preparation for or in consequence of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Within the realm of American Protestantism, particularly as expressed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, millennialism took two basic forms with differing social implications. Post-millennialism holds that the second coming will herald the beginning of a thousand year kingdom of Christ on earth, at the conclusion of which will follow the final judgement and the literal apocalypse. This form of Christian millenarianism generally emphasized the imperfectability of man, who requires Christ to usher in the thousand year kingdom of peace and prosperity, and the need for believers to take an active role in preparing their souls for salvation. Pre-millennialism, by contrast, proclaims that the thousand year kingdom of heaven on earth will occur before the second coming and the final judgement, and in fact will be brought about by the efforts of mankind to reform and perfect human civilization. Consequently, adherents of pre-millennialism inherently believe in the ability of humans to achieve perfection via their own efforts, without the intervention of Christ’s prior arrival on earth. Indeed, in the decades following the American Revolution the rise of pre-millennial thought in American Protestantism in turn gave rise to a legion of grassroots reform movements closely associated with the Evangelical faiths, including but not limited to campaigns in favor of temperance, women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery.

Though pre-millennialism and post-millennialism looked differently on the ability of mankind to usher in the millennium on its own, and thus placed differing emphases on the need for spiritual and earthly reform, both seemed to agree on the basic premise that human history possessed a predetermined end. Predestination was bound to this same idea as well, going so far as to proclaim that the history of each individual human soul had been decided far in advance of life’s emergence on earth. Because these concepts were, again, highly influential within 18th and 19th-century American Protestantism, it follows that the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies to whom Thomas Paine addressed himself with Common Sense where particularly attuned to ideas or arguments that seemed to conform to their theological conceptions of history, inevitability, and destiny. While it is true that significant portions of the colonial American population were adherents of religious faiths in which predestination specifically played little or no part – the Catholics of Maryland, Quakers of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the Anglicans of the Southern colonies – a sizeable number, perhaps even the majority, attached theological significance to some form or other of millennial thought.   

The Puritans of New England in particular were a population whose social fabric was strongly shaped by millennial thinking and the interplay between the perception of free will and the doctrine of predestination. The spiritual leaders of the first Puritan settlements at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay conceived of their enterprise as both a religious refuge from the Anglican Establishment in 17th-century England as well as an attempt at social perfection by self-imposed exile. Puritan settlement in America, they prophesied, would serve as a “city on a hill,” a beacon of true religion in a world beset by idolatry and moral corruption. Even after the First Great Awakening, which helped move a large portion of the 18th-century American Protestant community away from as rigid an understanding of predestination as held by prior generations, the notion that America and its people were somehow destined to lead the world toward an era of peace and prosperity still exerted a powerful emotional and psychological hold on the American mindset. Tapping into that vein of American socio-religious thought, which endorsed social and spiritual reform and the power of destiny, would thus have been an extremely useful tactic for those wishing to sway the American public at large towards this or that point of view. This, I do believe, is precisely what Paine attempted.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Common Sense, Part XII: Preaching to the Choir, contd.

Though Paine’s use, in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, of the word “God” rather than “Providence” or “Nature” is one of the more obvious ways he appealed to the spiritual sensibilities of his fellow American colonists, it is far from the only rhetorical technique he employed to that end. Over the course of said document’s four sections Paine made numerous references to various aspects of Protestant, or more broadly Christian, religion that delved much deeper into some of the more esoteric aspects of that faith than a simple invocation of the colloquial name for the Christian deity ever could. Among these more complex allusions the Old Testament figured prominently, as did suggestions of concepts like predestination (a staple of Calvinism) and original sin, along with the occasional jab at Catholicism and its adherents. While making use of the word God, in the proper context, was likely intended by Paine to appeal to the emotional side of his fellow colonists’ deep-seated faith, these more complex religious references were doubtless intended to tap into the strain of Biblical literacy that the Great Awakening had ingrained in generations of colonial Americans. By pointing to a particular passage in the Bible, or by shaping his arguments so as to suggest a similarity between Old Testament and American history, Paine attempted to tweak his audience’s knowledge of their own faith and its history to his advantage. At the same time he doubtless tried to demonstrate the depth of his own spiritual knowledge as a means of engendering trust between himself and his readers, thereby increasingly the likelihood of their accepting the validity of what he had to say.

A prominent, if not the most prominent, example of Paine drawing upon specific aspects of Christian history and theology in order to buttress his arguments in Common Sense can be found in paragraphs four through nine of section two. A somewhat lengthy digression into the aforementioned origins of monarchy in the history of the Israelites, these passages speak extensively of the prophet Samuel, the Judge Gideon, reference the governing structure of the ancient Jewish tribes, and juxtapose the allure felt by man for the prestige of being ruled over by an earthly king with the righteousness and humility inherent in acknowledging no other monarch than the Lord. Short of simply transcribing all that Paine had to say on these subjects, it will suffice to mention a few of the themes and some of the key terms he evidently deemed it important to discuss.

“Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom,” is how Paine tellingly began this segment. “It was,” he continued, “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” The equivalence drawn by Paine between monarchy and idolatry – the effective substitution of a mortal sovereign in place of God – is common throughout this particular discussion in Common Sense. At the same time it seemed he was keen on dismantling the accepted traditions of monarchy from the point of few of logic and reason, discussed in weeks past, he was also keen to establish the inherently impious nature of kingship among a people who claimed membership in the Christian faith. Also worth making note of is Paine’s use in paragraph four alone of the terms “heathen” twice, along with “the Devil,” “children of Israel,” “idolatry,” “Christian,” “divine,” “impious” and “sacred.” In terms of vocabulary alone it seems he was intent on catching the eye of his audience, as well as making himself quite clear as to the nature of the discussion about to take place.

The following paragraph, the fifth of section two, follows a similar pattern. In it he explained in no uncertain terms that, “the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.” In passages such as these Paine’s intention of arraying God’s will, as communicated through the prophets of the Old Testament, against support for contemporary 18th-century monarchy seems exceptionally clear. Somewhat more subtle, though hardly hidden, are his comparisons of the American colonists with the ancient Israelites and the British with the ancient Romans. When Paine wrote,

All anti-monarchical parts of scripture have been very smoothly glossed over in monarchical governments, but they undoubtedly merit the attention of countries which have their governments yet to form [,]

It would no doubt appear that he was referring plainly enough to the American colonies and the British monarchy, respectively. As later sections of Common Sense would make clear, Paine was of the belief that a united American government was both possible and desirable, and likely thought it prudent to seed the idea early on in his all-encompassing pro-independence pamphlet that monarchy was a morally-indefensible basis on which to build.

He followed this claim, however, with a declaration that though, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” was the doctrine embraced by royal courts, this was in fact not an argument in favor of the ancient origins of monarchy, “for the Jews at that time were without a king, and in a state of vassalage to the Romans.” Though this constituted a literal refutation of the conception that ancient Roman authority over Judea was monarchical in nature, the implication of this point of logic was intended by Paine to be somewhat more immediate. Though Britain, like the Roman Empire of antiquity, might claim absolute sovereignty over the American colonies, it implied, said colonists were not required to acknowledge the same. Like the Israelites of old the colonists did not possess monarchical governments, and in fact their relationship with Britain was more akin to subjugated vassalage than willing acquiescence. However at odds this characterization might have been with the reality of the colonies’ relationship with the British monarchy (i.e. it was), Paine’s identification of the plight of his fellow colonists with that of the Israelites of the Old Testament undoubtedly seemed a powerful one to his Biblically literate readership. More than once he would invoke said identification over the course of Common Sense, hoping perhaps to ingrain in his audience the supposedly ancient precedents for the struggle in which they found themselves and the exceptional role in coming events that they were capable of playing.

Paragraph six of section two elaborates further on what Paine perceived to be the acute similarities between the ancient Israelites and his fellow American colonists at the same time it reinforces the supposed disdain with which the Almighty was said to regard the concept of monarchy. After three thousand years had passed following the time of Moses, Paine explained therein, the Jews chose to ignore the will of God and requested their leadership grant them a king. This represented a break with established tradition, for the Children of Israel had, except in “extraordinary cases, where the Almighty interposed,” governed themselves via what Paine described as a form of republic, “administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes.” “Kings they had none,” he made sure to emphasize, “and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts.” Upon a cursory evaluation the parallels Paine seemed intent on drawing appear rather obvious. The Israelites, a people allegedly chosen by God, enjoyed three millennia of proto-republican self-government whose end came, not at the tip of an invader’s sword but as a consequence of their own poor and impious judgement in embracing monarchy. It would seem doubtful to me that a reasonably pious American colonist in 1776 could read as much in Common Sense and not be put immediately in mind of their present situation. It was, I would add, particularly astute of Paine to note that the Israelites brought the supposed “sin” of monarchy upon themselves. This admission of agency, that he ancient Hebrews were in control of their own fate and yet chose poorly, was doubtless intended to remind Paine’s fellow colonists that they too were in a position to choose for themselves whether to continue supporting monarchy or discard it altogether.

Indeed, Paine’s discussion of the ancient origins of kingship among the Israelites seems structured in such a way as to remind citizens of the Thirteen Colonies, poised in January, 1776 on a fundamental tipping point in world history, not to repeat the mistakes of their ancient counterparts. As a people who had governed themselves in a republican fashion the Hebrews, Paine noted, were worthy of exemplification. Their failure, as he characterized it their essential moral downfall, stemmed from their disregard for the prerogatives of God. After being led by Gideon to throw off the oppression of the Midianites, he related in paragraph eight of section two, the Children of Israel, “proposed making him a king, saying, Rule thou over us, thou and they son and they son’s son.” This, Paine had earlier related, was partially a consequence of the Israelites wishing to imitate the style and prestige of government as practised by many of their neighbors. Essentially they, a chosen people, had wished to be more like those who did not enjoy God’s favor. Gideon, fortunately, was a pious man, and his reply is where Paine seemed intent on laying the greatest emphasis. “I will not rule over you,” he quoted the great lawmaker and general as saying, “Neither shall my son rule over you. THE LORD SHALL RULE OVER YOU.” While the basic circumstances of this ancient scenario are not all that similar to those in which the population of the Thirteen Colonies found themselves in early 1776 – they had for generations acknowledged the primacy of the British Crown and were just now in a position to question its legitimacy – the moral injunction that Gideon delivered to his people no doubt rang as true to Paine’s highly pious audience as it had in Biblical antiquity.

Paine repeated similar entreaties, to the primacy of God over mortal kings as well as the folly of the Israelites desiring a king in imitation of others, in paragraph nine. As Gideon, he related to his audience, had rejected an offer of kingship following his defeat of their enemies, so too did the Prophet Samuel attempt to defer a request that he choose a king for the Israelites on the grounds that it was a slight against the dignity of God. Having petitioned the Almighty as to how to proceed, Samuel was supposedly answered by the Lord, “Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, THAT I SHOULD NOT REIGN OVER THEM.” The implication of this passage would seem to be, as no doubt Paine intended, that any people who favored an earthly monarch over the monarchy of Heaven were guilty of having rejected the authority of God. Again, this kind of argument could not have but struck the average, church-going, Bible-reading, 18th-century American as a powerful moral condemnation of the continued recognition of monarchy in general and the British Crown in particular.

Similarly impactful, or so Paine surely hoped, was his comment that by seeking a king for themselves the ancient Israelites had wished, “they might be like unto other nations, i. e. the Heathens, whereas their true glory laid in being as much unlike them as possible.” This sense of “unalikeness” that the Children of Israel had rejected is what Paine seemed intent on calling to the attention of his audience. Independence, and the concomitant rejection of monarchy, would indeed make Americans unalike from the great majority of the world’s population in the late 1770s. Lacking a king, they might face isolation, resistance to requests for bilateral trade, or even outright rejection of any kind of diplomatic relationship. Yet, he was keen to assert in the case of the Israelites, there was glory in being exceptional, particularly when it aligned with God’s oft-stated will. Americans were poised, not to move from republic to monarchy as the ancient Hebrews had foolishly done, but from monarchy to republic. This, Paine had repeatedly argued, was in keeping with the Lord’s express desire.

Indeed, he was careful to assert that it was not necessarily his own opinion he was arguing in favor of, but God’s as expressed through the sacred texts that formed the liturgical core of Christianity. “There portions of scripture,” he reminded his audience at the end of paragraph nine of section two, “are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, of the scripture is false.” Having rendered this powerful ultimatum Paine thus lent a tremendous rhetorical weight to his case for independence and against monarchy. The Bible and its reading held a special place in the spiritual lives of Protestant worshippers, and quotations thereof would of necessity have been taken seriously by any who considered themselves faithful members of the Christian community. Consequently, by populating his arguments with Biblical meditations Paine elevated the status of his pro-independence pamphlet from that of a potentially amusing curiosity from the pen of a radical commoner to a conduit for the sacred knowledge countless post-Awakening Americans had come to know and revere in their own lives; the very word of God.

Before I move on to a discussion of some of the more abstract spiritual concepts Paine alluded to at various points over the course of Common Sense I’d like to wrap up this post by taking note of two more references to the Old Testament of the Bible he made use of in section three of the same. Unlike the lengthy discussion concerning the origins of monarchy among the Israelites that dominates section two, said references were quite brief, informal, and seemingly off-the-cuff. Indeed, one might be tempted to gloss over them entirely as mere casual turns-of-phrase from an author accustomed to speaking in a rather pious voice. This was, of course, not the case. As mentioned previously, Paine was a thoroughgoing religious skeptic. The Bible, at the centre of the spiritual lives of many of his fellow American colonists, by his own admission held for him no particular inherent value. Consequently, even a seemingly casual mention of God, Satan, sin or salvation made by Paine must be regarded as highly significant.

The first is found near the end of the thirty-second paragraph of section three. Therein, Paine discussed what he regarded as the imbalance between the costs his fellow colonists had already paid during their conflict with Britain in terms of vital resources, money, and lives, and the actual value of a reconciliation and resulting return to the status quo. As mentioned previously, he expressed at one point his former sympathy for those in favor of a peaceful return to the traditional relationship between the Crown and the colonies. “No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself,” he wrote, “But the moment the event of [the 19th of April, 1775] was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever.” A fairly unambiguous allusion to the Pharaoh of Egypt in the Old Testament story of Moses, this was a convenient and no doubt effective shorthand by which Paine could reinforce the roles he had previously established for the British monarchy and the colonies, respectively.

In said story, chronicling the flight of the Jews from slavery in ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs (one who enslaves the Israelites and one who attempts halt their exodus) are undeniably the villains. The Israelites, a chosen people, suffered at the hands of these cruel, arrogant oppressors, and their deliverance arrives as a result of their possessing something that the Pharaohs lack; faith in the one true God. By referring to George III as “Pharaoh,” Paine thus suggested that the citizens of colonial America were the 18th-century equivalent of the Children of Israel; oppressed, cruelly mistreated, but ultimately destined for deliverance. Such a rhetorical construction admits of little nuance. The Pharaohs were not tragic, misunderstood villains, and the Jews were not morally ambiguous anti-heroes. If the King of England were thus a latter-day Pharaoh, he was unequivocally evil; if the Americans were the 18th-century secular counterparts of the ancient Israelites, they were God’s own children. At the same time that this scenario almost certainly sought to tweak the deep-seated religious and moral understanding of the 18th-century American public in order to engender a sense of confidence between Paine and his readers, it likely also attempted to force the undecided to cast aside any lingering sentiments vis-à-vis the British Crown. The conflict between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies was not, Paine appeared to argue, a complex, multi-faceted affair for which there was no simple solution. It was rather a choice between good and evil, oppression and freedom, the Pharaoh and the enslaved Children of Israel.

The second, and last, of Paine’s Biblical allusions I’d like to shine a light on occurs at the end of the forty-fourth paragraph of section three. After having laid out a loose framework for a theoretical national American government to replace the Continental Congress, Paine concluded by stating, “He that will promote discord, under a government so equally formed as this, would have joined Lucifer in his revolt.” Taken literally this would seem to indicate that Paine believed opposing or attempting to obstruct the operation of a government on the pattern he described would be tantamount or morally equivalent to rebelling against God. A concomitant assumption that might flow from this statement would be that said government, or the general principles behind it, or the virtue of the people who supported it, were in some sense specially ordained or blessed by God. Once again, a rhetorical construction such as this leaves little room for equivocation. Granted, a prospective reader could very well have disagreed with Paine’s assessment; perhaps they might have felt invoking God’s favor in order to promote a political enterprise was impious, manipulative or opportunistic. That Paine seemed to speak the language of the Protestant faithful, however, likely made his arguments difficult to simply ignore. Whether they agreed or disagreed with his unambiguously-expressed political sympathies it would likely not have escaped the notice of most readers in 1776 that the author of Common Sense had gone to significant lengths to demonstrate a knowledge of Christian history and theology and a clear reverence for God. Consequently a claim put forward by said author that an independent, politically united America was indeed blessed by God would have likely been difficult to dismiss out of hand. In that sense, even if a significant portion of his readership decided against him, Paine had at least succeeded in using expressions of mainstream Protestant piety to grab hold of his audience’s attention and thereby increase the likelihood of Common Sense achieving the effect he desired.