Paine “forced people to think the unthinkable, to ponder the supposedly self-evident, and thus to take the first step in bringing about a radical change.” And what was unthinkable? That colonists’ beloved King George III was really “the royal brute of Great Britain,” (he was) principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who, by increasing in power and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.
Most public school graduates have heard that Thomas Paine wrote something that convinced the colonies to declare their independence — though if they’re older than 21 their memory probably needs jogging. A few can even name what he wrote: Common Sense. And some can even incorrectly attribute a famous line to that pamphlet — These are the times that try men’s souls.
With rare exceptions most people don’t give a whit about Paine or what he wrote. But then, most people don’t care much for American history. What they don’t care about they don’t know about, as Mark Dice has ably demonstrated. Only if something is posted on social media does it count, and probably not for long. Whatever causal effects the days of 1776 might have had, they’re long buried in the great turmoil of events that followed.
But given that the country has been on fire in recent years and given the indoctrination that passes for formal education to explain it, we would be wise to take a closer look at some of the early fathers of our country, especially Thomas Paine, who Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernard Bailyn describes as the
bankrupt Quaker corset-maker, the sometime teacher, preacher, and grocer, and twice-dismissed excise officer who happened to catch Benjamin Franklin’s attention in England and who arrived in America only fourteen months before Common Sense was published
— and who had quit school at age 12 to work for his father.
Since the fuse was lit in Lexington in April 1775 colonists had been fighting a foreign ruler that was largely embedded in their surroundings. Their immediate rulers, including the British redcoats colonists had been ordered to house, were also their neighbors. Under George III their pleas for reconciliation had been ignored, and the prospects for peace and harmony with the “Mother Country” looked slim.
According to Bailyn, other notable pamphlets of the Revolution —
pamphlets written by lawyers, ministers, merchants, and planters—[probed] difficult, urgent, and controversial questions and made appropriate recommendations. . . Paine’s [pamphlet] had nothing of the close logic, scholarship, and rational tone of the best of the American pamphleteers . . . he had none of the hard, quizzical, grainy quality of mind that led Madison to probe the deepest questions of republicanism.
To put it bluntly, “Paine was an ignoramus,” Bailyn writes,
both in ideas and in the practice of politics, next to Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or [James] Wilson. He could not discipline his thoughts; they were sucked off continuously from the sketchy outline he apparently had in mind when he began the pamphlet, into the boiling vortex of his emotions.
And none of the others called for separation from England. And why would they? According to historian-economist Gary North, “the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.” Why would anyone pay attention to an uneducated immigrant calling for independence?
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