British reactions to their protests had demonstrated to colonial leaders that they had neither the power nor influence to budge king or Parliament. While they inveighed in vain for “no taxation without representation,” the rights of Englishmen that they had so long extolled began to seem hollow. British officials appeared determined to retract the informal autonomy the colonies had long enjoyed in the interest of making the empire run better—better, that was, for the mother country.

In the year before Paine’s arrival, a group of Bostonians had stealthily boarded three British ships laded with tea and thrown the cargo into the harbor to protest the detested tax on tea. Great Britain retaliated with punitive laws, closing the port of Boston, proscribing town meetings in Massachusetts, and ordering the billeting of British soldiers in colonial homes. In September 1774 delegates from every colony except Georgia arrived in Philadelphia for what they called the Continental Congress, a rather startling appellation coming from twelve sparsely settled colonies located between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. Despite divisions of opinion, the delegates managed to agree to boycott all trade with Great Britain as a way of insisting on their rights under “the principles of the English constitution.” An order for all colonies to form militias of citizen soldiers signaled their seriousness. In response, George III declared that the colonies were in a state of rebellion.

Like a metal filing drawn to a magnet, Paine found the places where Philadelphians gathered to debate the issue of the colonies’ relations with Great Britain. There he heard the array of positions circulating during these tense months. He learned of the deep pride most colonists felt for their British citizenship. Local officials regularly took oaths of loyalty to the king and were loath to break them. And the status of Americans as colonists made many timid in the face of the grandeur, might, and legitimacy of the British crown. All of this was anathema to Paine, for whom familiarity with the English King and his grandees had bred contempt.5

In the ensuing year, Great Britain beefed up its military position in the colonies, sending instructions to the new governor to disarm the Massachusetts militia and arrest the leaders of the resistance movement. From these orders came the “shot heard round the world” (the phrase is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 poem “The Concord Hymn”), when minutemen stood their ground before the British redcoats at Lexington in April 1775. But even with this spilling of blood, many colonists recoiled from using force and pledged their devotion to Great Britain. As loyalists, they stepped up their campaign to isolate the radicals—they argued that more resistance would only bring down the ferocious wrath of Great Britain. Loyalists and patriots continued to argue while the Second Continental Congress meeting in May 1775 began actually to govern the colonies.

Common Sense, with its defiant call for independence, electrified readers when it appeared in January 1776. Its incredible success can best be understood in the context of the excruciating indecision that had gripped the colonists. While there were radical leaders prepared to push for independence—for instance, Samuel and John Adams—too many men and women were apprehensive, not just about the dangers of a struggle for independence, but about the rightness of such a move. The British officials had a closed case from their point of view. The rights of Englishmen were protected by Parliament, and Parliament had rejected the Americans’ interpretation of their place in the empire. Common Sense ministered to the deep longing for clarity in those who had lived in a high state of unresolved agitation for more than a decade.

Paine was not a profound thinker. He was more a vector for the radical theorizing about the origins of government that Thomas Hobbes and John Locke began in the seventeenth century. In Paine’s day these heady ideas had bounced back to England from French philosophes like Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, who were wrestling with the problems of monarchical absolutism. European thinkers in the eighteenth century also wrote eloquently about how to reform penal codes, abolish slavery, and eradicate privilege. Paine had taken this all in, mixed it with his rage at the way English institutions thwarted the ambitions of ordinary men, and discovered in the American struggle “the cause of all mankind” (p. 13).

Paine stirred readers with the pungent prose of a Speaker’s Corner incendiary. He blended righteous indignation and grandiosity, even going so far as to implicate providence in the cause by suggesting that the “Reformation was preceded by the discovery of America: As if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted” (p. 35). He elevated the decisions of a group of provincials on the remote side of the Atlantic to enduring fame: “’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now” (p. 31).

An instant best-seller, Common Sense cut through the language of deference with the scalpel of analysis.