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A
History as it happens, it's January 1776. Robert Bell prints a 46 page pamphlet and advertises it in the local Philadelphia newspapers. Common Sense becomes an instant hit, selling over 120,000 copies in just three months. So writes historian Lindsay Chervinsky at the top of her latest substack post, to make the World Again. Thomas Paine, born in England, 1737, came to America not long before the Revolution and wrote his way into immortality. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, wrote Paine, is that nature disproves it. Otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion. This is the first in an occasional series of episodes, maybe one or two a month, marking America's 250th birthday, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In July, Thomas Paine made Americans confront the question of his time whether to reconcile or break from the mother country. Although he despised that term, he wrote, we have boasted the protection of Great Britain without considering that her motive was interest, not attachment, that she did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account, from those who had no quarrel with us on any other account. And it will always be our enemies on the same account. Common Sense was published two and a half centuries ago, but its message resonates now. Just pick up a newspaper or watch the news for five minutes and you'll immediately understand why the 18th century revolutionaries were so concerned about excessive executive power. In their day, it was monarchy. Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Her substack newsletter is Imperfect Union, where you can read the post. I just referred to our conversation next. Hey, you can support this podcast and never listen to ads again by tapping. Subscribe now in the show notes or go to historyasithappens.com ad free listening bonus content and 247 access to my entire back catalog of more than 500 episodes. Free for just $5 a month. Lindsay Chervinsky, welcome back.
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B
Thank you so much for having me back.
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A
Happy New Year to you. I trust all is well. Happy New Year. Yeah exciting at Mount Vernon these days as America 250 gets underway.
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B
It's a big year and you know what really has been very encouraging is that I feel like people are paying attention and even people who are not in the history world are commenting. Oh, it's the 250th and so that is Very encouraging for us in the history world that maybe there is going to be a lot of buzz and extra eyeballs on the sub to get.
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A
To Mount Vernon soon and see the refurbished mansion. I'm excited to see that. You know, I was looking forward to speaking to you because. Well, a couple of reasons. I am now kicking off what will be an occasional series, an episode or two a month about America 250. I think it's a great place to start, Thomas Paine's common sense. But also this gives me an opportunity to escape the 21st century, 20th century, depressing history and news. However, I say that. But at the same time, the American Revolution is always relevant. I mean, if you're reading the news today and you're trying to understand the tension or conflict between the executive branch and the legislature, well, Thomas Paine was writing about that issue in common sense. So let's start before we dive into his pamphlet, who was Thomas Paine? Based on his background, his influence on world events seemed unlikely.
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B
Well, that's so true. You know, I think the thing about moments, big crises like the revolution, is that they bring forward individuals who for all intensive purposes, should maybe at most be a footnote in American history or in global history. And Thomas Paine was certainly no exception. What I think is really interesting about Paine's background is that he was, of course, born in Britain and initially a British citizen, or considered himself to be a British citizen. He was born to a relatively poor family. Clearly he. He was taught to read and write because he was later able to read and write. And that's probably because his parents were fairly devout. His father was a Quaker and his mother was an Anglican. And it was often. Reading was often taught as a way to ensure that people participated in church. He did have a little bit of local schooling when it was not necessarily required. And then he had a series of apprenticeships and sort of itinerary work positions. He had one early marriage in which his wife and child died quite young. He then had another marriage in which he basically married into a grocery family and had the opportunity to kind of redo his business prospects. And both that business and the marriage ultimately ended up going sour. Around this time, he was actually appointed as a tax collector, which I think is hilarious, given what happens later. But he also starts to write, and he writes in defense of another editor whose press had been seized and he had been imprisoned for criticizing the king. And this is an important lack of what we would consider to have free speech at the time. Once his business prospects crumbled in late 1760s, early 1770s, he ended up meeting Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged him to go to the United States. And he did just a couple of years before the Revolutionary War officially began and arrived in Philadelphia.
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A
Very lucky meeting Benjamin Franklin in London. As you say, he didn't have much of a formal education at all, but he did learn reading, writing and arithmetic. And I guess in those days that set you apart from a lot of other people. He would have been called, I don't like to use this term, but a failure today in pretty much everything he tried. Right, but he must have had some talent as a polemicist, as a thinker. I mean, he did understand these issues despite his lack of a formal education.
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B
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think certainly his ability to think through complex issues and distill them into powerful, if somewhat simple rhetoric, or certainly inflammatory rhetoric was a skill that he honed over the course of several years. His experiences in witnessing what he saw as the real limitations of a monarchical system influenced his ability to speak out against it later.
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A
So when he arrived in America, he meets Benjamin Franklin's son in law, Richard Bach is how you pronounce it, B A C, H, E. Do you know how to.
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B
I have heard it pronounced Bache. I have heard it pronounced beche, Richard.
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A
B A C H E. And that gets him introduced in turn to a fellow by the name of Robert Aitken, who had a magazine, Pennsylvania magazine, Pain helps found it and edited it for a year and a half. So he's found his calling in the. In the print business. Common Sense was published early 1776, and I think it's important just to establish a little context here, the state of colony, crown relations, or what stage was the revolution in at this point? The war had started eight months before, as you mentioned in your substack post, and I'll share a link to that post in the show notes to this episode. I want people to read it. Major battles had already been fought. What state was royal authority in? Had it evaporated in much of British North America, it had.
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B
And I'm so glad you asked because I do think we often start this story with the Declaration of Independence, or maybe we start it with common sense. But at least a significant portion of the colonies already considered themselves to be in rebellion. George Washington had taken command of the Continental army and he joined the army in July of 1775. At that point, the battles of Lexington and Concord and the battles of Bunker Hill had already been fought. And so certainly for New England and Massachusetts in Boston, the war was very much a lived experience and common sense was sort of an afterthought at this point. But for a lot of other colonies, especially in the south, royal authority was still pretty strong. It still held sway. There was a lot of resistance. Of course, the Fairfax Resolves, which were sort of an early step towards declaring independence and were issued by Virginia. George Mason wrote them with George Washington. Those were published in 1774. But most royal governors in the south were still in place. Most royal charters were still in place. The legislatures were sort of grappling with that royal authority, but it hadn't completely broken down in the way it had in places like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
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A
Yeah, Boston was already full revolt. The Boston harbor was already shut down by this point. The king had already declared the colonists to be in rebellion. Mary Beth Norton's book about Virginia, I actually just ordered it. I have yet to start reading it. She argues that Virginia by this time had already been lost as well. And that was major state, major, I.
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B
Think it had been lost, but the royal governor was still in place. Because there's been a lot of discussion at this point about Dunmore's Proclamation. So Dunmore was the governor and issued a proclamation that famously said to enslaved Americans, if you come to the British lines, you will receive your freedom. And that took place in between the battles of Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence. And is one of the things that a lot of people point to as pushing a lot of nervous Virginians over the line because it was seen as such a betrayal of their society and the rule of law that they then supported independence. But at this point, a lot of Virginians were still sort of on the fence, were kind of trying to decide. George Washington was obviously not among them. He was already fighting the war. George Mason was obviously not among them. He had written these documents, but they were getting there.
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A
And not to go on about the Dunmore Proclamation because I can't ever seem to get rid of it. It's my fault for introducing it somehow, but ye, I don't think it was all that important. But we're not going to go there at this point.
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B
Depending on who you focus on, if you focus on Jefferson, then it feels really important, but if you focus on Washington, then it is almost completely irrelevant, because by the time the proclamation has come out, he's already fighting the war. So I think it really depends on who you're looking at.
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A
And very important to African Americans, of course, especially those who are held in bondage by the rebels, not the loyal British subjects, the Loyalists. But I guess what I'm getting at here, or what we're trying to get at, and this is something I've always found a little perplexing, is, you know, public opinion. It's not like there are polls being printed in newspapers across the colonies. You know, just where were the people at this point? When common sense comes out, one has to assume he wouldn't have had it published had everyone been on board with independence. One can assume that public opinion was still split. Why don't you pick it up from there?
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B
You know, there's the very famous John Adams quote, which is inappropriately attributed to this period, which says that one third were in favor of the Revolution, one third were Loyalists, and one third were in between. John Adams did say that, but not about the revolutionary period. He was referring to the early 1790s and the French Revolution when he said that. But I think those numbers are probably about accurate for early January 1776, in that there were about a third of Americans who were at this point already convinced independence was necessary. There were a third that were very loyal subjects to the British Crown and wanted to remain so. And then there were a third who either were undecided or like John Dickinson, believed that independence was inevitable, but that the time wasn't right right now. And I think where Thomas Paine is so important is he speaks to that middle third and convinces a significant portion to join the independence cause, such that by the time we get to the Declaration of Independence, I think the updated sort of numbers, and you're right, of course these are highly imperfect estimates because we didn't have public polling, but probably about half of Americans were in favor of independence. And then, you know, maybe 30% were still loyalists and 20% were unsure. Somewhere roughly around there, you know, there.
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A
Is this line between the radicals and the more conservative people or the people who wanted to possibly reconcile. This of course, relates to the Dunmore debate, which, as I said, I don't really think was that important. I think Virginia was already lost royal authority. But the follow up idea or question here is, okay, so if this was still a situation where reconciliation was possible and that independence wasn't inevitable, under what terms? By this point, early 1776, even people who weren't all for independence quite yet would have wanted a degree of autonomy from Great Britain that the King and Parliament probably weren't willing to grant them, do you agree with that?
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B
I do. So if we look at the offers that were made towards the end of the war to try and create what we would now call like a commonwealth system, sort of the way that Canada and Australia operate. Technically, they're a part of the commonwealth. They have a relationship with the king, but they have their own independent sovereignty and legislative management. That was on offer at the end of the war by the British officials. By then it was too late. Had they made an offer similar to that at the beginning of the war, I believe most Americans would have accepted it because they weren't necessarily initially opposed to a king per se. They were opposed to not having any representation in the body that made all the decisions. So if they had their own body, their own parliament, their own legislature that then had a figurehead like the king, that would have been fine. The problem was that idea that the concept of a commonwealth didn't actually emerge until the end of the war. So it wasn't something that British officials could even wrap their minds around until it was too late to get Americans to accept it.
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A
And that's where Thomas Paine comes in regarding a king, Right. He attacks the king who had been more popular than, say, parliament at this stage. The initial conflict with parliament and parliamentary sovereignty. Well, before we get to that, Lindsay, you're used to my meandering interview style by now. Before we get to that, Common sense is about 50 pages long. I actually read half of it before we connected here. I'm going to finish reading it. I think the last time I read it was in college, maybe. As far as 18th century pamphlets go, was this what we would call today a long read?
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B
Not terribly. I mean, it certainly wasn't a pager, too, which was probably the average length of what they called a printed broadside, which usually was like a. Almost like a poster that had text. And so that would be sort of like the more op ed style that we would think of today. But it wasn't uncommon for people to print pamphlets or to have them printed. And then newspaper editors would publicize that they were for sale and people could come buy them, and then maybe they would be printed sort of in serial form. At the time, the United States had. Well, what became the United States, the American colonies had very high rates of literacy already, especially in New England. New England rates of literacy were almost 100% because you could not be a Christian if you could not read your Bible yourself. And so everyone was taught to read, even if you were a servant, even if you were indentured. They even taught there often taught enslaved people to read. The south did have lower rates of literacy, but they were still much higher than, say, Europe. Even then, if you were not able to read all that well. Or if you didn't have the funds to purchase these things, you could often go to a local tavern and people would read them aloud. And taverns were a mix of hotels, what we would think of as, like, the local watering hole, a bar, a pub, the popular restaurant slash coffee shop. So they were really the hubs around which communities worked. And so you. You could get access to information in a way that is hard for us sometimes to comprehend. And so this length of a pamphlet wasn't necessarily an impediment, because people could get at it in so many different ways.
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A
You walk into a cafe today, and what are people doing? They're looking at their phones or computers, not listening to somebody read. Common Sense. Was Common Sense published in segments, a chapter at a time, or was it all. Was it published all in one, one go?
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B
It was initially published all in one go. So it was published in pamphlet form, and then sections of it were reprinted later, often as part of an advertisement to get people to buy it. So in that sense, it was always intended as a standalone publication.
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A
So you say here that most people could read in the United States or the colonies, literacy was widespread. Who was Paine's intended audience? Was it ordinary folks or intellectuals or both?
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B
It was really more the ordinary folk, because he wasn't making arguments about Enlightenment philosophers, which is what most of the intellectual elites at the time were discussing. So when John Dickinson, when Thomas Jefferson, when John Adams were making arguments, they were referring to ideological ideas about the rule of law and that tradition, the common law system in England, the English Constitution. And they were talking about people like Rousseau and Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. And this was a shared language that they all had. They were all very well educated, and when they referred to these types of people, they all knew what they meant. Most common men. Let's think of Philadelphia. So you're going to have people who work down by the port on the ships. You're going to have people creating ropes and barrels. You're going to have people who are selling goods. You're going to have farmers that are coming in from outside of town to share their goods. They might be able to read and write, but they're not necessarily reading Locke and Rousseau. Paine framed his arguments around almost like feelings that they did not need education to understand. Sort of a common sense concept of what each human being was born with and the common sense things that they would have seen, seen in their daily lives. Hence the title, Common Sense.
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A
Yes, the style, too. Paine style. You know, I have here Bernard Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winning the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which is still a terrific book. It was first published in the 1960s. It is, among other things, a history of the pamphlets. There are many great pamphleteers in those days. Some of their names have been lost to history, although Samuel Adams is a name most people might recognize, and not just because of the beer. Payne's style, as Balin puts it, really came from Great Britain. He said that American pamphleteers were more sedate, but in England you had a much more. How shall we put it? Aggressive style. One of Paine's critics, and this is a FOOTNOTE on page 18 of this book, noted Paine's main attack is upon the passions of his readers, especially their pity and resentment. He seems to be everywhere transported with rage, a rage that knows no limits and hurries him along like an impetuous torrent. Such fire and fury indicate that some mortifying disappointment is rankling at heart, or that some tempting object of ambition is in view, or probably both.
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B
You know, I don't know that that quote is entirely inaccurate. One of the things that I think we've seen over the course of human history is that it is often easier to inspire crowd action or mob action based on resentment or grievance than it is sometimes based on hope and enthusiasm. Payne argues that a lot of the things that the common man were aggrieved about was because of this monarchical system that was designed to first and foremost benefit the king, but then to benefit the aristocracy and to benefit the center of the empire thousands of miles away. And that's why the common man was sort of kept down. He does this in a couple of ways. He speaks to. One of my favorite sections is he talks about sort of the silliness of having this much power accrued in one person's inheritance. And what he says is basically, one man may actually deserve these plaudits and powers. Maybe you have a truly exceptional king, but you cannot tell me that every truly exceptional king only has truly exceptional children. He encourages people to look around them and say, like, look around the people that you're seeing? Like, are all of their children truly exceptional? And, of course, the answer is no. And so his ability to take the grievance and apply it to a monarchical system was truly extraordinary.
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A
The purpose here is to convince Americans that reconciliation time has passed. The war is underway. We cannot reconcile with these people. We need to go for independence. It's not just a screed. He tries to Lay out an argument against the British Constitution, an unwritten constitution. He says it's a farce. It's not a system of checks and balances. He argues because the monarch is sealed off from real information, he still has the most power. So it's ridiculous in Paine's view to say the. The House of Commons, which was elected by a tiny segment of the population. He said the House of Commons really can't check the monarch. This whole thing is just too confusing and complex. Referring to the British Constitution as a form of government.
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B
Well, and he was right. And I think this is where this part of his argument is particularly relevant. Because the king could not be held accountable under the British constitutional system. The idea of the British Cabinet or the Privy Council was that they were the ones that took responsibility, even if it was the King's decision. They were basically the fall guys for whatever the King did. And in theory, you would have a Privy Council or a cabinet that could advise the King towards wise action and thus if something bad happened, it was their fault. But that's rarely actually how it worked in practice. But because the king was still the king and could do basically. I mean, there were obviously limitations by the 18th century, but the king still wielded enormous power. And so there wasn't really a way for the legislative branch to check the king. The basis of the creation of our American system is that no one person is above the rule of law. No one person is unchecked. And congress and the courts can check the. The executive and can hold that person accountable. As a direct refutation of the British system.
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Yeah, the whole idea of the British system being in balance. And it struck the perfect balance. Paine said, that's nonsense. I'll just cite Balin here from his book. He said of Paine's pamphlet, it was a superbly rhetorical and iconoclastic pamphlet whose slashing attack upon the English monarchy. The one remaining link in early 1776 between England and the colonies. As I mentioned before, Lindsay in my meandering question, Parliament was already in the doghouse by this point. So the king still had some popularity. Anne upon the concept of balance in the Constitution made it an immediate sensation. But Bailin says if Paine was, with the exception of Marx, the most influential pamphleteer of all time, he was also one of the most controversial. How was Payne's pamphlet received?
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B
Obviously loyalists disagreed with it because they were quite loyal to the British king and rejected the arguments. On average, the common man supported it. It was the best selling item for quite some time. Some estimates suggest as many as 300,000 copies in the first year, although I think that's probably a little high given, given the population at the time. I think probably 140 to 150,000 copies is more likely. A lot of what we would consider to be more elite patriots. People like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson were sort of dismissive of the arguments because they felt that they had been making them for a long time and he wasn't necessarily saying anything new. Now, George Washington understood the power of this pamphlet, and so he, I believe, purchased copies for the troops and had them read aloud. And then later, recognizing Paine's way with words, hired him as what we would consider to be a wartime correspondent, to write about the troops and write about their exploits and their valor and write back to the American people. As a way to try and maintain support for the Continental Army.
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A
Some of his critics wrote long pamphlets themselves. There's no Twitter in those days where you typed out, you know, a tweet war. I hate reading those. They're so tedious, people attacking each other non stop. It's like, all right, put your phone down, go enjoy your weekend or take a long walk in the woods. In those days, you wrote a pamphlet. I mean, here's one. James Chalmers, he was a Tory. He wrote what Balin refers to as a ponderous response called plain, attacking Paine's assessment of human nature. Paine argued that too much power in a monarchy, there should be more power in a legislature because the legislature is more attached directly to the people. The critics say, well, there could be despotism in a legislature as well. That Paine was overlooking that this presaged.
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B
The argument that would come in the Constitutional Convention about where the threat to human liberty lay. And they had some experience with this. So after the Declaration of Independence, the Pennsylvania legislature created a new, new constitution. It was a unicameral legislative system. It was extremely radical and very responsive to what we would consider mob passion, or what they called mob passion. Just a few years later, it was largely considered to have gone too far in that direction. And so the Constitutional Convention is an attempt to try and find a middle ground between the threats of anarchy and authoritarian impulses, impulses on either side.
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A
So how many minds did Paine change? I mean, it's impossible to know for sure. I guess the real question is just how influential was his pamphlet? It's a counterfactual to say, well, if this had never been written, would history have turned out the same way? We don't know but it was written, and it must have had some impact. How would you assess it?
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B
Well, it certainly had some impact. It's impossible to know exactly how many minds it changed. It changed enough that the stage state legislatures started to either give instructions to their states to explore a Declaration of Independence, or at least give permission for their delegates to vote for that type of measure which they had previously been blocked from doing. So what I think actually makes it hard to sometimes tell the impact is that Paine then published a number of other pamphlets later on. One was about the French Revolution, and one was basically a conjugation nation of George Washington. And they were both considered to be so radical that it really tarnished his reputation. It makes it difficult for us to know 250 years later how much of that erased any sort of impact we might see otherwise.
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A
Sure, you know, because he did publish something about religion, where he attacked organized religion, that did hurt his reputation. But Jefferson brought him back to the United States, tried to rehab his image there. But, you know, as Balin said, it was a sensation. So it helped the populace confront the issue. Right. Just like you would see somebody writing a powerful book today or the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his newspaper that he kept running for 20 years or so. It helped bring the issue to their attention and force people to confront it in the key decision making months here of the American Revolution, the early part of 1776. And he's basically putting the question to people. At some point you either have to decide one way or the other. So I guess in that respect it was very powerful and influential.
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B
You know, I think an interesting parallel is maybe like Uncle Tom's Cabin in the lead up to the Civil War, because you certainly had had a lot of abolitionist speakers and writers talking about the importance of abolition and the cruelty of slavery in a lot of different venues. But sometimes you need a cultural spark to make the argument more widespread, to make it more understandable, or to break through any information silos. And certainly there's evidence to suggest that Uncle Tom's Cabin did that and that common sense did so as well.
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A
Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries. Tis time to part. He had all caps for that one. Even the distance, even the distance at which the almighty half placed England in America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of the one over the other was never the design of heaven. So last thing here, Lindsay, something that's really remarkable when you read this pamphlet, and it is worth reading again. It's Something else is that Paine understood that this was not just a local incident or event, that the American people were on the stage of history, that this would have lasting consequences for all of mankind, as he put it. He understood they were on the stage of history and that this was important. And I guess that just speaks to what we're going to be celebrating, hopefully, and thinking about this year, the surpassing importance of the American Revolution.
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B
You know, the American Revolution was there's a long standing argument about whether it was a conservative or a radical thing. I personally take the argument that it was a conservative revolution, but it was a revolution based on an idea, and it was a government based on an idea. And that in and of itself was a radical notion that you could tear down a monarchy and put in place a government for and by the people based on this concept of equality. And that sparked generations of revolutions around the globe. And while, of course, Thomas Paine could not possibly predict the future, he certainly understood the enormity of what Americans were trying to do.
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A
Lindsey Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, as we kick off this occasional series of episodes on America 250, on the next episode of History As It Happens, it is a bonus episode with Ana Tal Levin of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. What happens when a chief executive, whether the premier of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s or the president of the United States today, becomes divorced from reality? And you can sign up for my newsletter too, that is free at substack. Just search for History as it Happens.