This Day in American History

Jan. 10, 1776 – English émigré Thomas Paine published Common Sense, which called for the American colonies to declare independence, and quickly, from the mother country. The pamphlet, issued in Philadelphia, was an immediate sensation. Paine later estimated that 150,000 copies were sold in that year alone.

Visiting Philadelphia three years ago, I was struck by the fact that it became home to two ambitious but penniless strangers who quickly achieved media fame after they fled from the restraints of family.

Ben Franklin had escaped his bossy brother in the family’s Boston printing shop. Thomas Paine, after failed attempts at four jobs (corset-maker, teacher, excise-tax collector and tobacconist) and two marriages (one wife dead, the other separated) in England, had taken up the cause of the revolutionaries, coming into a circle of prominent Philadelphia patriots, including Dr. Benjamin Rush and the astronomer David Rittenhouse.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the influence of Franklin is readily apparent in the self-help aphorisms of the eponymous protagonist. But an element of Paine exists in Jay Gatsby, too.

Just as the Midwestern farm boy changed his name from James Gatz to the more euphonious Jay Gatsby, so Paine, in the same year that he published his sensational pamphlet, added an “e” to his surname, rendering him less likely to invite ridicule and puns. It might also be said that Gatsby, like millions of other Americans, took personally what Paine intended as a national credo: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

In the process of reinventing themselves, Franklin and Paine would invent America. Yet, if you look all over Philadelphia, the city that took them in – or anywhere in America, for that matter – the traces of Franklin are much easier to find than Paine’s. During my visit, I noticed only one small, easy-to-miss plaque commemorating the publication of this epochal polemic, erected in 1992 at the southeast corner of South Third Street and Thomas Paine Place. It notes that “At his print shop here, Robert Bell published the first edition of Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet in January 1776.” That’s it – a sorry reminder of the man whose words have been recited by generations of schoolboys, editors and politicians since then.

In arguing for independence, Paine sees America as a nation set apart – even, he argues oddly enough for this later infamous deist, as a result of providence. Not only does he cite its vast distance from foreign powers as a distinct advantage in any upcoming conflict with the mother country, but he casts the upstart set of colonies as an asylum for liberty according to a divine plan: “The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither protection no safety.”

(Focus also on that last clause – written like a man for whom “home,” in the form of a spouse he’d left for a better life, had become something hateful.)

Although his controversial 1794 tract The Age of Reason argued vigorously against miracles, Common Sense might represent the best counterthrust against his thesis. For unlike Jefferson at William and Mary, Hamilton at King’s College (later Columbia) or Madison at Princeton, Paine had only minimal schooling and exposure to the Enlightenment philosophes that inspired so many fellow revolutionaries. But his prose – brisk and hard-hitting when not incandescent – could be understood and quoted by virtually any American with the slightest exposure to books (which, at that time, was likely to be the Bible – a book he quoted from extensively, to devastating effect, to demonstrate the longstanding folly of monarchies).

I read Common Sense in Paine’s Collected Writings in the Library of America edition edited by Columbia University historian Eric Foner. While more expensive than a paperback, this series of books is inviting – on acid-free paper, with sewn bindings that allow the book to lie open flat, with readable type.

In contrast to governments the world over, then and now, the American system of democracy is louder and more contentious. Were he alive today, Paine would undoubtedly be a blogger, blazing away at whatever subject came his way (and trying out his ideas in each succeeding new medium – fascinated almost as much by science and technology as by politics, he worked on such inventions as smokeless candles and a single-arch iron bridge).

But while we consider the prospect of Paine in the superhot 24-hour electronic age, it’s also good to remember the words that found their mark at the dawn of the republic, and continue to do so today. I could fill the “Quote of the Day” for the next year with excerpts from his works, but these from Common Sense still stir the heart in a cynical age:

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.”

“Youth is the seedtime of good habits, as well in nations as in individuals.”

And, in a time of terror, my favorite:

“Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her.—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”