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Thomas Paine, a reluctant English tax collector and failed businessman who arrived in America on the eve of revolution, printed “Common Sense” on this day in historical past, Jan. 10, 1776.
“In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments and common sense,” Paine wrote.
“The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.”
The explosive treatise fueled revolution in the minds of the American individuals. It implored colonists to stand behind the heroic rebellion towards the British crown underway in Massachusetts.
The American Revolution was in its infancy on the time. The Massachusetts Minutemen had routed the British military at Concord in April 1775 and chased the Redcoats all the way in which again to Boston.
A memorial engraving of Thomas Paine, with a smirk on his face, containing his dates of beginning and dying, with textual content studying, “The World is my Country and to do Good my Religion,” as figures of faith and legislation protect themselves from his picture, 1815. From the New York Public Library. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
An military of New England farmers, now underneath the management of General George Washington of Virginia, was laying siege to the Brits in Boston in the winter of 1775-76.
“Common Sense” scripted the following chapter. It proved wildly standard and helped encourage the Declaration of Independence simply six months later.
It was merely worded however philosophically profound, printed in the rabble-rousing pamphlet format standard in the period.
Paine wrote, with nice gravitas, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
The New Testament notion of a brand new starting for fallen humanity served as the non secular basis of the Revolutionary War era. Paine stuffed his work with references to the failures of the kings of the Old Testament.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” — Thomas Paine
“Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ made an irrefutable argument for separation from England and described the revolution as not only achievable but inevitable,” writes the Thomas Paine Society.
“Throughout the colonies letters to newspapers quoted Paine’s words. ‘Nothing else is talked of,’ wrote Bostonian Andrew Elliot to a friend in London. ‘I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it.’”
Pamphlet cowl of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, 1776. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group through Getty Images)
Many of the searing criticisms in “Common Sense” of overbearing, unaccountable authorities ring as true at the moment as they did in 1776.
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one,” Paine wrote.
Paine’s call to mental and bodily arms “sold 120,000 copies in its first three months, and by the end of the Revolution, 500,000 copies were sold,” stories the National Constitution Center.
“The estimated population of the Colonies (excluding its African-American and Native American populations) was 2.5 million.”
“Common Sense” bought the equal of 66 million copies relative to America’s inhabitants at the moment.
It’s as if a e-book bought 66 million copies by at the moment’s U.S. inhabitants — making “Common Sense” maybe the best-selling work in American historical past.
Paine mocked the concept of monarchy as a professional type of rule. It was a very revolutionary idea amongst a species ruled for the reason that daybreak of recorded time by strongmen, tyrants and hereditary rulers.
UNITED KINGDOM – CIRCA 2003: Portrait of Thomas Paine (Thetford, England, 1737-New York, USA, 1809), English revolutionary, politician and mental. Oil on canvas, by George Romney (1734-1802), 1876, 40×30 cm. London, National Portrait Gallery. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)
“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy,” wrote Paine. “The state of the king shuts him from the world, but the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.”
Paine was born in Thetford, England, on Feb. 9, 1737.
Searing criticisms in ‘Common Sense’ of overbearing, unaccountable authorities ring as true at the moment as they did in 1776.
“He later worked as an officer of the excise, hunting smugglers and collecting liquor and tobacco taxes. He did not excel at this job, nor at any other early job, and his life in England was, in fact, marked by repeated failures,” writes Biography.com.
“In the spring of 1774, Paine was fired from the excise office and began to see his outlook as bleak. Luckily, he soon met Benjamin Franklin, who advised him to move to America and provided him with letters of introduction to the soon-to-be-formed nation.”
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Like many earlier than and hundreds of thousands extra after, Paine discovered new hope in America.
He arrived in Philadelphia on Nov. 30, 1774, simply six months earlier than protest turned to open warfare on the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Among his first efforts in America, Paine printed a scathing indictment of the worldwide slave commerce.
Replica of the Declaration of Independence. Some students say Thomas Paine had a hand in drafting the Declaration of Independence. (iStock)
The Englishman reserved his biggest monarchial mockery for the British crown in explicit.
“No man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conquerer is a very honorable one,” Paine wrote of the Norman invader who defeated Anglo-Saxon King Harold in 1066.
“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy.” — Thomas Paine
“A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as king of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original — it certainly hath no divinity in it.”
“Paine’s convincing arguments against the monarchy and British domination spread like wildfire throughout the colonies and turned the public tide toward independence,” writes the Thomas Paine Society.
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George Washington proclaimed, “I find that ‘Common Sense’ is working a powerful change there in the minds of many men. Few pamphlets have had so dramatic an effect on political events.”
Some students argue that Paine performed a silent function in drafting the Declaration of Independence. Whether true or not, his contributions to the reason for revolution had been removed from over.
He printed “The Crisis” with Washington’s military in tatters after repeated routs and the reason for independence about to collapse.
Washington crossing the Delaware, close to Trenton, New Jersey, Christmas 1776. George Washington, 1732-1799, first president of the United States. From English and Scottish History, printed 1882. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group through Getty Images)
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine famously wrote with poetic ardour on Dec. 23, 1776.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
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Two days later, on Christmas evening, Washington led his military on a daring raid throughout the Delaware River to overwhelm a Hessian outpost of the British crown in Trenton, New Jersey.
“The Crisis” had now turned in America’s favor — in favor of Paine’s “cause of all mankind.”
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