How One Man Launched a Revolution (Spring 2018 | Volume: 63, Issue: 1)

How One Man Launched a Revolution

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Authors: Christine Gibson

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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Spring 2018 | Volume 63, Issue 1

In May 1775, the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, rowing across the Potomac, met George Washington rowing in the other direction on his way to the Continental Congress. The two conversed briefly on the fate of the colonies, and Boucher asked Washington if he supported independence. “Independence, sir?” Washington replied. “If you ever hear of my joining in any such measure you have my leave to set me down for everything wicked.” Even when he took command of the army in July, Washington later admitted, he “abhorred the idea of independence.” So what changed his mind? By his own admission, it was more than anything else the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, written by a little-known Englishman named Thomas Paine and published January 10, 1776.

Until that day most colonists, like Washington, hoped to regain the rights afforded to all other British subjects. But as Washington wrote, “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 separation.” Paine convinced an America already at war with Britain that it was fighting not merely for lower tariffs or the right to elect representatives to Parliament but for its own inevitable independence.

Born into poverty in Thetford, England, in 1737, Paine failed at marriage and a string of jobs before he was 37. His lower-class status and debts shut him out of politics; this sharpened his sense of injustice and left him suspicious of government. He labored to educate himself, reading the leading political thinkers of the time. In London in the early fall of 1774 he met Benjamin Franklin, who persuaded him to emigrate to America. And so, Franklin’s letters in hand, Paine left to start over his life in the New World—little realizing he would help start over the New World’s life as well.

He caught typhus during the nine-week, 3500-mile sea voyage and had to be carried ashore in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774. During his month-long recuperation he began to seek out the city’s intelligentsia, aided by Franklin’s letters of introduction, and by January he had landed a job at Pennsylvania Magazine. Apart from the typhus, he flourished in his new home. No longer an outcast because of his income or his political views, he fit right in at the center of American political foment. While working at the magazine and attending meetings of many debating, literary, and scientific clubs, he began to develop new, radical opinions.

In America he saw a perfect reverse image of England. Where England was rotten and corrupt, America was pristine and egalitarian. His thinking expanded to fill the borders of his new country, and as he became convinced of the colonies’ virtue and destiny, the abstract theories of independence and representative government he had debated over pints crystallized into realities worth dying for.

But despite all the bloody events that had begun in April 1775, most colonists shied away from advocating complete separation from England. Shots had already been fired at Lexington and