“Common Sense” at 250 – guest opinion and misc. resources

Today is the 250th anniversary of the release of Thomas Paine's influential pamphlet Common Sense. This historian from Youtube (see inserted posting below) has a unique perspective. Used WOP.

Lots of people right now are celebrating the 250th anniversary of Common Sense, especially politicians on the right and left. Well, okay, center left. And none of them are getting it right. John Roberts opened his 2025 year end report on the federal judiciary, the one in which he said the Constitution was rock solid by celebrating Thomas Paine. And Jamie Raskin, the Democrat in Congress, has been pushing for a Paine memorial on the National Mall and posting some glorious things about him on social media.

Same person, opposite projects.

One invoking Paine to legitimate the consolidation of executive power. The other to honor the man who wrote that executive power itself was the problem. And that man, this one, being invoked by so many to represent the American Revolution, wasn’t an American. He knew very little about it and he had almost no experience with it when he wrote Common Sense. So, here’s your resistance history minute or eight or whatever for today. I’m Tad Stoermer, the author of A Resistance History of the United States.

January 10th, 1776, the Pennsylvania Gazette ran a notice: “This day is published and now selling by Robert Bell in Third Street. Price two shillings. Common Sense addressed to the inhabitants of America.” Two shillings. A decent dinner with beer cost you one and a half. Paine thought priced it too high. They fell out. Paine tended to do that with people. And the next edition came out at a shilling, half the price, because Paine wasn’t writing for the people who could afford two whole shillings, more than at dinner. Most people didn’t buy it anyway, though.

Textbooks love to say it sold 500,000 copies. But in a country with paper shortage and not that many presses, that was physically impossible. The real number was closer to 75,000, which is astonishing on its own. A literary work wouldn’t reach those heights in America until what, Uncle Tom’s Cabin?. And so his ideas moved through newspaper excerpts, pages copied by hand, tavern readings, a big one. One copy doing the work of a hundred. So you can multiply the impact.

So what was Paine saying? And what were Colonial Americans hearing? Turns out, not the same thing. Not if the patriots had anything to do with it. First, Paine went after the source of the rot. Mankind being originally equals. Where did kings come from? Paine’s answer, sin and violence. The first king was nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, organized crime that got old enough to call itself a government. Hereditary succession, hereditary authority was worse. Nature disapproves it. Otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion. And then he went through the Bible. Gideon refusing the crown because only God should rule. Samuel warning the Israelites what a king will take. Your sons, your daughters, your fields, your vineyards. The whole institution originated in sin. It wasn’t theology. That’s not what Paine was about. Was called a dirty atheist. It was biblical language shorn of the theology. The moral framework his audience already had turned brilliantly against structures they’d been told were permanent.

And then there was the part that scared many patriots. Men without property should vote. Men without property should hold office. Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Now monarchy wasn’t the problem. Not really. Anyone who’d read anything knew that. The constitutional settlement after 1688 had solved it. Real power ran through parliament. The fight was about parliamentary authority. George III had influence but he wasn’t Louis the 14th. He hadn’t been a problem in Britain for a century. Well, at least kings hadn’t.

Paine went after the crown anyway. Partly, it’s personal. His time as an excise officer in England had ground him down in a system that felt arbitrary and cruel. But ordinary colonials didn’t think in constitutional subtleties. They knew the king as power. They read their Bibles. They understood tyrants. Paine gave them a cartoon villain because a cartoon villain was what they could see, was what they could understand, that level of abuse of authority. Members of the Patriot Resistance in New England loved it. John Adams said Paine was a man who has genius in his eyes.

But others in Patriot leadership didn’t want people hearing all of that. They needed Paine’s genius, but they didn’t want his conclusions. In Virginia, many of the enslaver patriots wanted to keep the lid on entirely. Richard Bland, some considering him Virginia’s greatest constitutional scholar, he called Paine a blockhead, an ignoramus who had grossly mistaken the nature of the Jewish theocracy. And another Virginia enslaver wrote in his diary that he had told Richard Henry Lee that Common Sense was nonsense.

These were enslavers, men who needed people to be property to suit their greed and their politics. And their politics required property to ensure their own independence. It’s a twisted form of republicanism. And there was Paine, out there telling anyone who’d listened that men without property should vote, should hold office, should have political authority, that one honest man was worth more than all the crowned ruffians who ever lived. That kind of talk circulating where people might hear it could only cause problems for them. But the patriot movement, especially the one for independence, hadn’t caught fire in Virginia amongst the sorts not named Henry Jefferson Lee.

They needed something to move people. So, they curated Paine. And here’s how it was done in Virginia. 10 years ago, I’m digging in archives and I find a letter forgotten. It’s from John Page. He was head of the Committee of Safety and Thomas Jefferson’s best friend. And he tells a story. One day in January 1776, he was walking down Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg, when a mysterious figure, Paige called him an “invisible hand”, slipped him a parcel and then mysteriously disappeared. In it was Common Sense. The full pamphlet along with instructions to publish it.

Okay, think about this. It took days for anything to get from Philadelphia to Williamsburg. So, someone must have grabbed it from Bell’s shop and immediately dispatched it to Williamsburg for Paige to get the whole thing so quickly. Paige understood the assignment, so he took it to the place where I did all my best work in Williamsburg, the pub, or in his case probably Raleigh Tavern. And he went to work. And Paige didn’t like what he read. We don’t know whether the instructions included this part. They might have, given who I think sent them.

But Paige tore Paine apart. He picked paragraphs. He rearranged sentences. He used Paine to construct a case for independence as he thought it should be built, but using Paine’s words. Alexander Purdie’s paper ran his version as something of an exclusive on February 2nd. So what was Paige’s version of Paine? Paige did not argue with Paine. He edited him. He stripped away the opening sections where Paine takes a hammer to kingship itself, where monarchy is described as sin, where heredity is ridiculed, where Paine grounds legitimate political authority and the equality of ordinary men. Paige gutted almost all that. What he kept were the parts that made Britain look foolish, made it look dangerous and expensive to stay connected with. And then he took Paine’s challenge to any talk of reconciliation with Britain.

Originally, it was buried deep in the pamphlet. He hauled it up and put it to the front so colonial Virginians could read the whole thing as a practical case for independence, not as a moral assault on hierarchy. Paine had written a democratic bomb. Paige diffused it, turning it into an argument for secession that Virginia’s enslaver patriots could live with. What Virginians read wasn’t Paine’s Common Sense. It was Paige’s “Common Sense”. This is what they do. This is what they’ve always done. Find the radical who can move people. Strip out everything that threatens you and deploy what’s left.

The real Paine was too dangerous to circulate whole. So they didn’t because he wasn’t one of them. Paine had been in the colonies only what 14 months. He was from Thetford, near London. But his immediate appeal to regular white colonials shows how different they weren’t from their English cousins. But America’s founding mythology requires a distinct American identity already in place by 1776. Read your Benedict Anderson. And Paine somehow tapped into that. And later when he had the chance to unpack its democratic impact, John Adams railed at Paine. He called Common Sense “a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass.” Oh, Adams.

Benjamin Franklin’s daughter, Sarah, wrote that the most rational thing Paine could have done would have been to have died the instant he had finished Common Sense. So the Patriots wouldn’t have had to deal with Paine himself. The patriots who ran things weren’t fans, but they were jealous of his influence. So they used him and they kept using him. In December 1776, Washington’s army was dissolving, falling apart. So Paine wrote The American Crisis to meet that moment to speak to the soldiers in ways that Washington could never: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Washington had it read aloud to the troops before the Delaware Crossing, and it kept enough of them in the ranks to make a difference. 40 years later, John Adams gave Thomas Paine another think. He then was responding to what the revolution was really about, to questions about the revolution and independence and July 4th.

What do they really mean? To a generation that had forgotten it and distance was actually helping him out He could be honest about that moment. “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain,” Adams wrote.

And then, seething to Jefferson because historians kept confusing the revolution with the war. He said “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” It’s not resentment. We got to understand what Adams is actually talking about here. That was a man admitted something he didn’t want to be true, because they were the Revolution.

Paine was independence. Different things. Adams knew that and it’s why Paine never sat comfortably in the founding story. Most of the real American Revolution had already happened before Paine ever set foot on America’s shores. That was all between 1765 and 1775 between the Sons of Liberty and Lexington and Concord. It was James Otis thundering against the writs of assistance. It was Sam Adams organizing Boston streets and taverns. It was Mercy Otis Warren writing sharp plays about corrupt royal governors. It was years of patriots arguing about rights, representation, and power in their own language, grounded in their own experience. That was the revolution. That was the intellectual and emotional break from British authority and British identity that enabled direct resistance to it.

Paine had nothing to do with any of that. He wasn’t even here. He never engaged those arguments or that history. He arrived from England with his own radicalism already formed and dropped it whole into a fight that was almost over for the radicals, but maybe had not yet begun for almost everyone else. That’s why the patriots could use him, but never fully accept him. His pamphlet didn’t grow out of the American resistance. It crashed into it. The careful language of John Dickinson or swings of Thomas Jefferson weren’t moving anyone in a dirty shirt. Paine did. So, they took his fire and they aimed it where they needed it.

Paine was not the revolution. Paine was the accelerant. But Paine was a revolutionary. Don’t ever lose sight of that. Against monarchy anywhere, aristocracy anywhere, slavery everywhere, established religion entirely. When Paine died in 1809 in New York, six people showed up and he was denied burial in a Quaker cemetery. His bones dug up later, taken to England and lost. We don’t know where Thomas Paine is buried. And then for the 250th anniversary, Jaime Raskin calls Paine “…a critical and singular voice who’s been underrecognized and overlooked.” And he sponsored the bill for a memorial. Then Raskin posted on social media that, “Hey everybody, it’s the 250th anniversary of Common Sense, whose luminous author Tom Paine figured centrally in the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the movement for democracy. So sweeping the earth, the times hath found us.” These people.

And then there’s the other side. John Roberts quoting Paine in his report is like George III quoting Common Sense. The man who authored Trump versus the United States granting presidents immunity for official acts now invokes the man who warned that a thirst for absolute power is a disease. Roberts pulls exactly the passage he needs. Governments’ purpose is to serve the people while ignoring everything Paine meant by it. Now the Heritage Foundation does the same thing, right? These are parts of the same coin. Surprise, surprise. They’ll tell you Paine wrote from the vantage of a libertarian favoring small government, low taxes, maximum liberty. Then note with disappointment that he later became a social democrat, advocating welfare like there was some transition. Translation, it’s the Sally Bache line. Paine stops being useful to Americans in 1776. He dies as far as they all are concerned.

Then this is how history serves nationalism, folks. The left reaches for it. The right reaches for it. Both to serve their own modern political interests about what they think the nation should be based upon the same set of founding facts and both of them missing the history or purposely evading it, but reinforcing that it’s the moment we all need to be focused on. It’s a bizarre take and in that sense Roberts and Raskin might have more in common with John Page than with Thomas Paine. John Page sitting in a tavern picking which parts of Common Sense to print to post which parts suit his political needs and get rid of the rest.

What would Paine be doing today? I don’t know. It wouldn’t be at a memorial dedication, I got to tell you that. He’d probably be in Minnesota and he’d be all over social media on every platform that would have him firing bomb after bomb, not just at the obvious villains, but everyone stopping short of the core problem, the moderates, the institutionalists. He had particular fire for them in Common Sense. The ones who criticize ISIS’ excess while voting to fund it because those guys just apparently need better training and clearer guidelines. The ones who concede the premise, you know, ‘we do have an immigration problem,’ before making their carefully bounded critique. Paine had a phrase for those people, “…the moderate men who think better of the old world than it deserves.” And he warned that that group “…by an ill-judged deliberation will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the others.”

“[To] Their good fortune, the moderates,” he wrote, “is to live distant from the scene of sorrow, the evil not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the pain.” Thomas Paine’s earliest and maybe still best biographer wrote that Benjamin Franklin said, “Where liberty is, there is my country.” But that Paine supposedly answered where liberty is not there is mine. Now Franklin’s line’s very Franklin. So it seems, right, teaming with comfortable assumptions about liberty and the belief that it already lives inside the institutions we belong to, that it resides where the flag flies where the laws are written where the ceremonies happen. It is a statement of comfort and Franklin was all about chase and comfort. So you belong where power says you belong mostly because of your relationship with it.

Paine’s answer is also very Paine. It means something very different. It means your loyalty does not flow towards where a flag flies, where authority is settled, but where it is failing. Your country is not a place on a map. It’s a state of mind. It exists wherever people are being ruled without consent. Wherever power is claiming legitimacy it has not earned or it has surrendered. Where abuse is the order of the day where the uncomfortable are. That’s why the real Paine makes no comfortable person safe. So you have to make him into a statue. Turn him into a place you can visit.

No, his words demand movement. They force you to ask where you stand when liberty is missing. Where liberty is not, there is my country. That’s not a quotation for a plaque. It’s a test. Pass or fail. Where is your country?

For more on Paine, I recommend Eric Foner‘s Tom Paine and Revolutionary America and Sophie Rosenfeld‘s Common Sense; A Political History. And you share your favorite sources and your thoughts about Thomas Paine below.

That’s all I got.

Agree? Disagree? Have a different perspective? Leave a comment below.

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