Independence (44 page)

But the viewpoint around which a majority of congressmen coalesced in January was to send another army into Canada “with the utmost Dispatch.” The delegates reasoned that Quebec City might still be taken before British reinforcements arrived, which would not occur until the St. Lawrence thawed in the late spring. Some believed there was no choice but to continue to fight for Quebec. Should the British regain their citadel, they warned, the royal authorities would mobilize the Canadians and the Indians against the colonists, and they would strike the northern provinces with “a force … more formidable than that of all the British Troops they can import into America.”

Some saw another urgent reason for continuing to campaign for Quebec. Word had reached Philadelphia of both the king’s address and Germain’s remarks hinting that peace commissioners might be sent across the sea. Some believed that if Canada could be taken before the envoys arrived, it would be an important bargaining chip in the negotiations with the commissioners. Within seventy-two hours of learning of the defeat at Quebec, Congress not only ordered seven regiments to be raised and sent to Canada but also, for the first time, authorized the payment of bounties to raise recruits for the Canadian army. Quietly, too, news of the setback at the gates of Quebec stirred the Committee of Correspondence to let contracts with Pliarne and Penet, the two Nantes merchants who had languished impatiently for weeks in Philadelphia. With the sanction of Congress, trade was opened with France in order to secure arms and munitions.
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Just days before word of the Canadian calamity reached Congress, an express arrived with the first tidings of George III’s October address to Parliament. “It is decisive,” a New Englander instantly responded. No greater proof was needed that Britain’s monarch “meant to make himself an absolute despotic Tyrant.” Samuel Ward added that “Every Man must now be convinced that … our Safety depends wholly upon a brave, wise and determined Resistance.” Samuel Adams told others that this proved the king was the driving force behind British policy. War guilt “must lie at his Door,” he added. A Virginian, Francis Lightfoot Lee, concurred. The king’s speech laid bare his and North’s “bloody intentions” and demonstrated beyond doubt that it was folly to any longer continue “gaping after a reconciliation.”
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Thirty-six hours after the express brought the king’s speech to town, Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
, the most important pamphlet published in the American Revolution—indeed, the most influential pamphlet published in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—hit Philadelphia’s streets. Its central argument was cogent and timely: Reconciliation was not in the best interests of the colonists.

The thirty-seven-year-old Paine was an Englishman who, like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, had failed at numerous endeavors. Unemployed, divorced, and at loose ends, he had left his homeland in 1774 to begin a new life in America. He claimed that he came to the colonies planning to start a school for girls, but if that was his intention, he never got around to it. In his last years in England, with time heavy on his hands, Paine had taken to writing essays. He discovered that he had a facility for writing. Furthermore, he could earn a modest living as an author, enabling him to avoid toiling for sixty hours a week, as his other jobs had required. Paine had hardly landed in Philadelphia before he took up his pen. He published a newspaper or magazine article roughly every two weeks during his initial ten months in the city. He wrote about the war, calling it wicked and “unworthy [of] a British soldier,” attacked slavery, and reflected on science, mathematics, dogs, dueling, women (“at all times and in all places” women have been “adored and oppressed”), love, ancient history, and unhappy marriages.
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Within a few months, it was apparent to Paine’s growing number of readers that he was no ordinary writer. His essays, typified by a seldom-equaled clarity, also brandished an unmatched passion and verve. Sometime in the autumn of 1775—most likely when Dickinson persuaded the Pennsylvania assembly to instruct its delegates to Congress to seek redress and reconciliation—some congressmen and private citizens in Philadelphia appealed to Paine to pen a tract urging American independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of Philadelphia’s leading physicians, somewhat artlessly though accurately told Paine that he had nothing to lose by writing such a radical essay. What, Rush asked, could happen to someone who was already unemployed and nearly penniless?

The thought had already crossed Paine’s mind. Though he had previously intended to write a series of short newspaper pieces on American independence, the entreaties of influential men set him to thinking in terms of writing a longer essay suitable for a pamphlet, and in November he commenced work. Paine made writing look easy, though in reality it was hard, slow work for him. He lashed himself to his desk for a few hours daily and over the course of a month crafted an essay of some eighteen thousand words. Not much of his argument was original. He had heard the ideas bandied about in coffeehouses and taverns, and some of his polemic—especially those portions dealing with governance in England—was the staple of eighteenth-century English radicalism. It was Paine’s genius to marshal the disparate arguments in a cohesive and straightforward manner. Above all, Paine presented his arguments to readers in an inviting literary style.
Common Sense
was free of nearly indecipherable jargon and minus the recurrent Latin phraseology so popular with the lawyers who wrote most of the pamphlets. It was crucial for Paine to write in an accessible manner, as he was seeking to do what few other pamphleteers had ever tried. Most pamphleteers wrote for the best educated in society. Paine consciously sought a wider audience. His object was to convince the mass of colonists that it was desirable and feasible for America to sever its ties with Great Britain, and he especially wished to bring on a transformation in how American independence was viewed by the inhabitants of the most recalcitrant colonies, including Pennsylvania.

Thomas Paine by John Wesley Jarvis, ca. 1806–1807. Paine’s
Common Sense,
issued in January 1776, was the first pamphlet to openly advocate independence. He wrote that independence would be the birthday of a new world, and that it would lead to peace and prosperity for the American people. (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

The first few pages of
Common Sense
, which are no longer well remembered, were not unimportant. Paine explained that government was much simpler than the common people had been led to believe by the best educated and socially elite, who, of course, wished to continue monopolizing power. As government’s purpose was to secure the safety and well-being of the citizenry, Paine wrote, it was only “common sense” that the citizenry should share in the governing process. In sketchy terms, he outlined republican governance. All that America needed for its government was a unicameral assembly (which it had in Congress) that was broadly representative of the people (which was not particularly true of Congress, though Paine did not point this out). In such a system, Paine continued, the elected representatives would have “the same concerns at stake [as] those who have appointed them” and would share “a common interest with every part of the community.”

Great Britain’s system was the very antithesis of what he had described, Paine told his readers. Dominated by a monarch—who came to the throne through hereditary succession—and a titled nobility who inherited seats in one house of Parliament, Britain’s rulers seldom displayed “fidelity to the public” and “contribute[d] nothing towards the freedom of the State.” The Crown—the monarchy—was the “overbearing part in the English constitution,” the engine that drove the entire system, Paine added. As
Common Sense
appeared at the same moment that word of the king’s October speech to Parliament arrived in the colonies, what Paine said appeared to be dead on target.

“The evil of monarchy,” Paine asserted, was that it had left England groaning under kings who all too often were “foolish … wicked, and … improper,” sometimes too young, over and again too old, on many occasions “ignorant and unfit,” their “minds … early poisoned” by the belief that they were “born to reign, and others to obey.” Not least among the iniquities of monarchy was that royal families were sequestered from their subjects to the point that they were unfamiliar with the wants and needs of the people. Kings, Paine went on, had little to do but create titles and make wars, and the wars they had started had “laid … the world in blood and ashes.” The staggering result of war after war, not to mention the cost of creating sinecures for favorites and sycophants, was that the citizenry had been shackled with oppressive taxes to pay for it all.

But above all else, if monarchy contributed little of benefit to the people of England, it was actively baneful to colonists who lived three thousand miles away and whose outlook and interests were usually strikingly different from those of the English Crown and nobility.

However, by remaining tied to Great Britain, Americans were victimized by far more than monarchs and aristocrats. The American people and the British nation had dissimilar interests, but imperial governments sought almost solely to advance the interests of the latter. As a result, the connection to royal Britain left Americans to suffer “injuries and disadvantages.”

This moved Paine to challenge Congress’s very reason for fighting the war: to reconcile with Great Britain. To remain tied to the mother country would not only inhibit American commerce; it would also subject the American people to a “second hand government” on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. “America is only a secondary object” to that British government, he contended. “England consults the good of this country no further than it answers to her own purpose.” It will drag America into European wars that are of no concern to the colonists. It would fight those wars as long as it wishes. It would make whatever peace on whatever terms it pleases without consultation with the provincial authorities.

There were those who said that “America has flourished under her … connection with Great Britain [and] the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness,” Paine wrote. This was a “fallacious” assertion, he responded. “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.” Others said that Britain has protected America. True, Paine wrote, but London safeguarded the colonies in order to exploit their wealth and trade. Dependence was no longer necessary. America was capable of standing on its feet.

Paine took a swipe at “all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation,” including those in Congress and none more clearly than Dickinson. He charged that they were “Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who
cannot
see; prejudiced men, who
will not
see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent, than all the other three.”

He then threw down the gauntlet: “I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain.” None existed, Paine insisted. Once independent of Great Britain, Americans could govern themselves and secure the true interests of America. Peace and prosperity would ensue. “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” The time had come to declare American independence. “ ’TIS TIME TO PART.”

Once it was independent, republican America would be an example to the world. American independence would strike “a new era for politics”—it would be nothing less than the ‘birthday of a new world.” Sounding very much like the revolutionary that he was, Paine proclaimed, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

In the final section of
Common Sense
, Paine maintained that victory in a prolonged war for independence could be won. America was unified and debt-free, and it had the resources and manpower for creating powerful armies and a sturdy navy. (America needed a fleet only one-twentieth the size of the Royal Navy to be “an over-match for her,” he claimed.) Paine implied—he was careful not to make this a categorical argument—that help from Great Britain’s traditional European enemies, France and Spain, could be had and that it would be useful. What he did say unreservedly was that it was “unreasonable” to expect French and Spanish assistance so long as reconciliation—“strengthening the connection between Britain and America”—was the object of the war. When Congress declared independence, he implied, Versailles and Madrid would find that intervention on America’s behalf was desirable; for if London lost its colonies, Great Britain would be seriously weakened. Aside from Paine’s assaults on monarchy and reconciliation, it was this cogent passage—merely one long sentence—that made
Common Sense
so timely. The pamphlet had no more than appeared before word arrived of the disaster at Quebec. Where once many would have taken umbrage at the thought of a foreign alliance, the horrific failure in Canada led many to see that close ties with France were perhaps America’s only hope of saving itself.
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