Common sense

Based on Wikipedia: Common Sense

In early 1776, a recently arrived English immigrant published a small pamphlet that would become the most influential piece of political writing in American history. Within three months, an estimated 120,000 copies had sold—in a country of only 2.5 million people. Adjusted for today's population, that would be like selling six and a half million books in a single quarter. The author was Thomas Paine, and his forty-seven-page pamphlet was called Common Sense.

It remains the best-selling American title of all time.

A Reluctant Revolution

When Paine stepped off the boat in Philadelphia in November 1774, the American colonies were already fighting the British. Shots had been fired. Blood had been spilled. Yet almost no one was talking about independence.

This seems strange to us now, knowing how the story ends. But the colonists at the time weren't dreaming of a new nation. They were subjects of the British Crown who wanted their grievances addressed. They wanted better treatment, fairer taxes, proper representation. What they emphatically did not want was to break away from the mother country entirely.

Paine later reflected on this attitude with some amazement. The colonists, he wrote, "might have been led by a thread and governed by a reed. Their attachment to Britain was obstinate, and it was, at that time, a kind of treason to speak against it." People grumbled about their problems, but they didn't imagine an alternative. Their "single object was reconciliation."

Into this atmosphere of tepid discontent, Paine hurled a bomb.

Plain Truth Becomes Common Sense

Paine originally planned to write a series of newspaper letters under the working title "Plain Truth." But as he wrote, the argument kept growing. It became too long and too unwieldy for a newspaper. So he turned it into a pamphlet instead.

Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and a Philadelphia physician, recommended a printer named Robert Bell. Rush knew that other printers might balk at the pamphlet's incendiary content. Bell, he promised, would not hesitate.

Bell didn't just print the thing—he zealously promoted it in Philadelphia's newspapers. The first edition appeared on January 10, 1776. Demand exploded immediately. A second printing became necessary almost at once.

And then things got messy.

Paine, thrilled by the pamphlet's success, tried to collect his share of the profits. He had grand plans: he wanted to donate the money to buy mittens for General Montgomery's troops, who were freezing in Quebec. But when his intermediaries audited Bell's books, they discovered something infuriating.

The pamphlet had made zero profits. At least on paper.

A Very Public Feud

Paine was furious. He ordered Bell to stop any new editions—he wanted to add appendices and release an expanded version through different publishers. Bell ignored him completely and began advertising a "new edition" anyway.

This touched off a month-long public brawl between the two men, conducted through the advertisements and pages of the Pennsylvania Evening Post. Each accused the other of fraud and duplicity. Meanwhile, Paine partnered with the Bradford brothers, who published his expanded edition with new appendices. Bell kept printing his own versions. Both kept selling.

The controversy, ironically, only made the pamphlet more famous. The squabble was excellent publicity. Estimates of how many copies sold vary wildly—some historians claim 100,000 in 1776, others suggest 500,000 in the first year across America and Europe. More conservative estimates put the upper limit at 75,000, citing the limited literate population. But whatever the true number, the circulation was staggering.

Beyond the printed copies, handwritten summaries and full transcriptions circulated widely. At least one newspaper, the Connecticut Courant, printed the entire pamphlet in a single issue. In France, it was published in translation—though with the anti-monarchy sections carefully removed.

The Argument

What made Common Sense so explosive? It wasn't just that Paine called for independence. It was how he made the case.

The pamphlet opened with a distinction that sounds almost philosophical: the difference between society and government. Society, Paine argued, emerges naturally when people realize they're better off cooperating than living in isolation. It's a good thing, a source of happiness and mutual support.

Government is something else entirely. Government is a "necessary evil." It exists because humans aren't angels—because we need rules and enforcement to prevent us from hurting each other. If people were perfectly virtuous, we wouldn't need government at all. But we're not, so we do.

This framing was clever. It positioned government not as a divine gift or a natural right of rulers, but as a practical tool—and one that should be judged by how well it serves the people. If a government fails at this job, the people have every right to replace it.

The Case Against Kings

Paine then turned his attention to the British constitution, and here he was merciless.

The English system, he argued, contained not one but two tyrannies: the king and the aristocracy. Both held power by heredity. Neither earned their positions through merit or service. They contributed nothing to the people they ruled over.

But Paine went further than political theory. He made a biblical case against monarchy—a brilliant move in a society where the Bible was the most widely read and respected text. If all men are created equal, he asked, how can the distinction between kings and commoners be legitimate?

He walked his readers through scripture. He quoted Gideon's refusal to become king when the people demanded it. He reproduced nearly all of First Samuel, chapter eight, where the prophet Samuel warns the Israelites about what a king will do to them—take their sons for soldiers, their daughters for servants, the best of their fields and vineyards for himself. God himself, Paine declared, had "entered his protest against monarchical government."

Then came one of the pamphlet's most memorable passages:

In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

This was not the measured language of diplomats. This was a call to revolution.

Against the Mixed Constitution

Some moderate thinkers of the era believed in what was called a "mixed constitution"—a system that balanced monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements. The English philosopher John Locke had promoted this idea: a Parliament to make laws, a monarch to execute them, with each branch checking the others.

Paine thought this was nonsense.

The problem, he argued, was that power in such systems inevitably concentrates in the hands of the king. The limitations placed on the monarch are theoretical; in practice, he finds ways around them. And if you admit that monarchical power is dangerous—which the advocates of mixed government clearly do, since they want to limit it—then why include a monarch at all?

It's like hiring a guard dog you know is prone to biting and then trying to manage the problem with a muzzle. Why not just get a different dog?

A Blueprint for a New Nation

Paine didn't just argue for independence; he sketched what might come after. He proposed what he called a "Continental Charter"—essentially an American Magna Carta that would establish a new form of government.

The details were ambitious. Each colony would elect five representatives at large, plus two members from its own assembly and two from Congress—nine representatives per colony for a Continental Conference. This body would draft the charter, which would guarantee "freedom and property to all men" and "the free exercise of religion."

For the ongoing government, Paine envisioned a large Congress—at least 390 delegates, with each colony sending at least 30. A lottery system would rotate the presidency among the colonies. Passing laws or electing a president would require a three-fifths majority.

Was this system practical? Perhaps not in every detail. But it demonstrated something crucial: that alternatives to monarchy weren't just fantasy. They could be designed, debated, and implemented.

The Loyalist Response

Not everyone was persuaded. The Reverend Charles Inglis, an Anglican clergyman from Trinity Church in New York, wrote a rebuttal called "The True Interest of America Impartially Stated." His review was scathing: "I find no common sense in this pamphlet, but much uncommon frenzy."

Inglis defended limited monarchy as "the form of government which is most favourable to liberty" and best suited to the British temperament. Only "a crack-brained zealot for democracy or absolute monarchy" could think otherwise.

Another loyalist, James Chalmers, published his own response under the pseudonym "Candidus" and titled it, pointedly, "Plain Truth." He quoted Montesquieu's warning that democracies are uniquely susceptible to civil wars and internal chaos. His pamphlet concluded with an ominous pronouncement: "Independence And Slavery Are Synonymous Terms."

Even John Adams, who would become the nation's second president and was hardly a royalist, had reservations. He found Paine's vision "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

Adams wanted independence, but he wanted it managed carefully, with checks and balances. Paine's radical democracy frightened him.

The Anonymous Author

For nearly three months, despite the pamphlet's sensational fame and the very public feud with Robert Bell, Paine managed to stay anonymous. His name didn't become officially connected to Common Sense until March 30, 1776.

The anonymity had costs. Paine never recovered what he believed Bell owed him. He lost money on the Bradford printing too. And because he eventually gave up his copyright entirely, allowing anyone to print the pamphlet who wanted to, he never made a cent from the most influential American book ever written.

But perhaps that was appropriate. The pamphlet was never really about Thomas Paine. It was about an idea—one that caught fire and burned through thirteen colonies in a matter of weeks.

The Sermon That Started a Revolution

Historians have often noted that Common Sense reads like a sermon. This was intentional. Paine was writing for an audience raised on Protestant Christianity, people who heard sermons every Sunday and took the Bible seriously as a guide to life. By framing his political argument in biblical terms, by structuring his rhetoric like a preacher building to a climax, he met his readers where they lived.

Gordon S. Wood, one of the leading historians of the American Revolution, called it "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era."

The word "incendiary" is well chosen. Before Common Sense, independence was an idea without a movement, a possibility that respectable people didn't seriously entertain. After Common Sense, it was a cause with millions of supporters, a vision that seemed not just possible but inevitable.

Six months after the pamphlet appeared, on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. The revolution that Americans had been fighting almost accidentally became a revolution with a purpose.

An English immigrant with a gift for plain language had given a reluctant nation permission to imagine a different future. And once they imagined it, they couldn't stop reaching for it.