The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (71 page)

These actions worried congressional opponents of independence, worried John Dickinson in particular. At his instigation a few days after Congress gave the lead to New Hampshire, the Pennsylvania assembly instructed its delegation not to agree to a separation from Britain or to a change in the form of Pennsylvania's government. The legislatures of Delaware and New Jersey gave similar instructions to their delegations before the end of the year, and Maryland's followed in January 1776.
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Even as these legislatures acted, a mood grew which would shake their prudence. The mood was, more precisely, a loss of faith in all things British, a mood increasingly disposed to favor independence. By January it had found able spokesmen, most notably Thomas Paine in one of the great tracts of the Revolution --
Common Sense
.
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Thomas Paine, the son of an English Quaker who earned his living as a corset-maker, had arrived in America only thirteen months before publication of
Common Sense
. He was thirty-nine years old, and he had failed at everything he had ever tried. He had tried, like his father, to earn a living making corsets -- and failed. He had tried teaching and failed. He had served as a tax collector, only to be dismissed from the service. He had also tried shopkeeping -- and failed. He had even tried marriage -- twice.
His first wife died in childbirth; his second was

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a wife in name only, for the marriage was never consummated.
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Paine's friend George Scott, an excise official, had introduced him in 1774 to Benjamin Franklin, who was then finishing his mission as a colonial agent. Franklin apparently saw something in Paine, some talent that had not yet found its medium, and when he learned that Paine wanted to go to America, he wrote a letter introducing him to his sonin-law Richard Bache, a Philadelphia merchant. Paine probably did not intend to go into business in America, though after his arrival on November 30, 1774, he sought out Bache. Soon he was contributing verses and essays to local newspapers.
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Somehow, perhaps in his various failures, Paine had learned to write. Now he put this skill to work in the service of a cause he hoped would benefit mankind. His message to Americans challenged several of their profound convictions -- that their rights were rooted in the ancient constitution and that their interests were protected by the traditional connection to Britain. Paine called these convictions "illusions." None of the old political truths, it seemed, were any longer true. The British constitution, far from being one of the glories of civilization, was founded on "the base remains of two ancient tyrannies" -- monarchy and aristocracy. For the most part American writers had avoided attacking the monarchy even after war began, and they professed to believe that the king was in hands of an unscrupulous ministry. Paine disdained to honor such fictions. The monarchy, he explained, was "the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry." As for the hereditary succession of monarchs, the practice violated nature which "disapproves of it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion." There was much more of this sort of wit in
Common Sense
along with shrewd attacks on the institutions that Americans had long believed tied them to Britain. Much of the demolition was placed in a context, or a language, sure to appeal to the mass of Americans. Thus Paine rang in the Old Testament history of monarchy, and if his readers missed the linkage to heathenism, he told them flatly that monarchy was the Popery of government.
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For those presumably immune to shock and for those devoid of Protestant prejudice, Paine offered "simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense" of the American condition -- that it would only deteriorate should some temporary reconciliation be achieved. To back this contention Paine cited several conventional arguments, all demonstrating the divergence of British and American interests. But perhaps his most compelling point -- not much noticed since -- reminded Americans that blood had recently been spilled, and with its loss American affection for the "mother country" had drained away. American passions had been engaged in the struggle, and the passion that was directed toward Britain was hatred. The conclusion to this analysis seemed obvious: "Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream."
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Much of what Paine wrote had already been said in the nine months following Lexington. The events of those months, giving evidence of the stubbornness and hostility of king and Parliament, made belief in reconciliation difficult to sustain.
Common Sense
helped Americans see just how far they had come in the struggle to protect their rights, made them see that they could not go back to the old relationship of 1763. If Paine was right not the king, nor the Parliament, nor the English people had any desire for the old arrangements. A part of what Paine was saying had been said by pamphleteers for a dozen years -- there was a conspiracy afoot to enslave the colonies. But Paine went farther: he showed that the conspiracy inhered in the very structure of the AngloAmerican arrangements. Because the conspiracy could not be separated from the monarchy or from the British constitution, the Americans, it seemed, had no choice. They must declare their independence.

A declaration of independence might be only common sense, but Paine clearly believed that it would be more -- it would indeed be a break in history. He told Americans of the importance of what they were doing in only a few sentences: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now." How seriously this phrasing was taken is impossible to say. There is no doubt though that it was calculated to appeal to the residue of Christian millennialism from the American past, and while it proposed a rupture in history it also offered a balm, the assurance that the American Revolution should take its place in Christian history.
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Inevitably there were answers. Inevitably the answers and the answers

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to the answers (by Paine and others as well) plumbed the depths of invective. But those who took part in the debate also reached toward the truth and caught glimpses of the American future. The critics of the contention of
Common Sense
that independence must be declared immediately offered a variety of refutations. The timing was off, some said; others argued that the idea was bad because American liberties could never attain the security long provided by the ancient constitution. Several answers sensed the importance of Paine's dream of beginning anew in America and discussed it with such scare words of eighteenthcentury politics as "innovation," "Utopian," "visionary," and "anarchy." Paine responded as the "Forester," a name chosen perhaps to evoke images of a life in America free of European corruptions, with the contention that an independent America had "a blank sheet to write upon." What, he asked, did America have to fear "but her GOD"; for America, "remote from all the wrangling world, may live at ease, Bounded by the ocean and basked by the wilderness. . . ."
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Paine published
Common Sense
in Philadelphia, and his Forester essays first appeared in that city's newspapers. His friends also chose Philadelphia newspapers, and so did his political enemies. But since the controversy involved the "continent,"
Common Sense
was reprinted in all the major American cities and the minor ones as well. Of course the debate spread, drawing in big men, John Adams, for example, and small ones as well. Within a few months over 100,000 copies of
Common Sense
had appeared, and the debates between independence and reconciliation dominated the newspapers.
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A part of the common sense offered by Thomas Paine was the observation that Britain's old enemies in Europe would be more likely to provide support to the colonies if they declared their independence. No European power wanted to meddle in an internal dispute which might be settled by Britain and her colonies joining forces, as they had in the past, against an external enemy. Declaring independence would reassure Europe, reassure in particular France, the nation that some in Congress looked to for money and arms.

By the first months of 1776, the group in Congress which was disposed to seek foreign aid was adding to its numbers.
These radicals -- their

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radicalism consisted of their belief in American independence rather than reconciliation -- agreed upon a schedule of actions which they believed gave promise of a successful war for independence. The two Adamses, the Lees, and their followers thought that the formation of new state governments was the crucial first step. Although they had no clear idea about the shape of these governments, these men saw in their creation a means of tying the American people to independence. Once the colonies had given themselves new governments the next steps should be, as John Adams proposed to Patrick Henry, "for all the colonies to confederate and define the limits of the continental Constitution; then to declare the colonies a sovereign state, or a number of confederated sovereign states; and last of all, to form treaties with foreign powers." Adams was to write to Henry on June 3, when it was fairly clear that all these measures would soon follow, that perhaps, their order was not very important.
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In February the radicals had considered the sequence of action as critical to their plans. And their plans, though centering on the measures Adams disclosed to Henry, included a variety of moves which only solid governments could take. A memorandum drafted by John Adams listed them: an alliance should be made with France and Spain; ambassadors should be sent to both countries; coins and currencies were to be regulated; armed forces were to be raised and maintained in Canada and New York; the production of hemp, duck, saltpeter, and gunpowder was to be encouraged; taxes were to be levied; treaties with France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark were to be concluded; British ships were to be declared fair game for American privateers; independence was to be declared as was war on Britain. There were other items on the radicals' agenda, but their overriding concern remained a declaration of independence.
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