Through connections made in the unsuccessful excise campaign Paine was introduced in London to Benjamin Franklin, then acting as agent for Pennsylvania. Franklin agreed to give Paine some letters of introduction to take to America. Franklin’s note indicates how little he or any one expected from Paine. He wrote to his son-in-law, a Philadelphia merchant:

The bearer Mr Thomas Paine is very well recommended to me, as an ingenious, worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you give to him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor (of all which I think him very capable) so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.1

In Philadelphia, Paine tried his hand first at teaching. But he was soon persuaded to write, by the printer of the Pennsylvania Magazine, himself a recently arrived Scotsman. Throughout 1775 Paine wrote short miscellaneous pieces for Philadelphia newspapers and magazines. One was an outspoken attack on slavery. In the Pennsylvania Magazine, which Paine edited, he wrote scientific articles as well as political ones. His interests were wide-ranging and instinctively progressive.

In November 1775 Paine began writing his anonymous essay Common Sense. Ever since 1763 Britain and the American colonies had been at odds over the British government’s newly levied taxes and customs duties, which were intended to make the colonists pay for some of the huge expenses of the recently concluded French and Indian wars (the Seven Years’ War, in its European phase). Only in 1773 and 1774, however, with the Boston Tea Party and Britain’s harsh reprisals, did tensions rise to the point where armed clashes developed and talk of independence could be heard. It was by no means certain even as late as 1775 that reconciliation was not possible – that is, until Paine published Common Sense, with its simple and dramatic call for America to declare its independence.

The plea for independence boldly urged in Common Sense caught the public imagination. The pamphlet ‘struck a string which required but a touch to make it vibrate’, a contemporary noted. ‘The country was ripe for independence, and only needed somebody to tell the people so, with decision, boldness and plausibility.’ Edmund Randolph of Virginia later noted that ‘the public sentiment which a few weeks before [the publication of Common Sense] had shuddered at the tremendous obstacles, with which independence was environed, overleaped every barrier’. General Washington commented that increased hostilities, ‘added to the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contained in the pamphlet Common Sense, will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation’. In Massachusetts a citizen noted that he believed ‘no pages was ever more eagerly read, nor more generally approved. People speak of it in rapturous praise.’ In Philadelphia the book made numerous converts. In sending the pamphlet to a friend in London a contemporary of Paine’s noted that ‘Common Sense which I herewith send you is read to all ranks; and as many as read, so many became converted; though perhaps the hour before were most violent against the least idea of independence’.2

George Trevelyan in his History of the American Revolution has summarized the impact of this pamphlet, which by February everyone knew was from the pen of Tom Paine:

It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting… It was pirated, parodied and imitated, and translated into the language of every country where the new republic had well-wishers. It worked nothing short of miracles and turned Tories into Whigs.

It is estimated that almost one hundred thousand copies of Common Sense were sold in 1776. Translated immediately into French, with the anti-monarchical passages deleted, it became an instant success in Paris. Silas Deane, the American emissary in France, noted that Common Sense ‘has a greater run, if possible, here than in America’.3

Paine’s pamphlet had influential opponents as well. John Adams, for example, who shared Paine’s views on independence, feared the radicalism of the pamphlet and the effect ‘so popular a pamphlet might have among the people’. He replied to Paine in the draft of his Thoughts on Government which he circulated among influential patriots in the spring of 1776. Adams, a much more conservative thinker than Paine, agreed with his call for separation, but he trembled at its popular tone and its prescription of a simple political system for independent America without the complex balancing and separation of powers inherent in the older British model. Paine’s ideal sketched in Common Sense, Adams wrote, was ‘so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work’.4

John Adams notwithstanding, far fewer criticized Paine’s pamphlet than praised it. Instant fame came to Paine when it became known that he was the author of Common Sense. But he was not a man to sit idly in his newly acquired literary and political glory. In July 1776 he enlisted in the American army, soon becoming aide-de-camp to General Greene. For the next seven years, while the war with Britain dragged on, Paine combined his military role with journalism and produced a series of remarkable pamphlets designed to maintain American morale as well as to make the case for America in England and Europe.