Nothing
that I have read, by or about Thomas Paine, does so good a job explaining my
connection to the great American revolutionary as this passage from John
Ferling’s book, Independence:The Struggle to Set America
Free, Bloomsbury Press:2011, pp. 217 – 223.
Thomas Paine
didn't invent the American Revolution, he brought people around – aristocrats
and the common people alike – to the necessity and the urgency of it.
This
passage is totally worthy of your time and attention. If you like what
you read here, read the book.
Just days before word of the Canadian calamity reached Congress, an express arrived with the first tidings of George III's October address to Parliament. “It is decisive," a New Englander instantly responded. No greater proof was needed that Britain's monarch "meant to make himself an absolute despotic Tyrant." Samuel Ward added that "Every Man must now be convinced that . . . our Safety depends wholly upon a brave, wise and determined Resistance." Samuel Adams told others that this proved the king was the driving force behind British policy. War guilt "must lie at his Door," he added. A Virginian, Francis Lightfoot Lee, concurred. The king's speech laid bare his and North's “bloody intentions" and demonstrated beyond doubt that it was folly to any longer continue "gaping after a reconciliation."
Thirty-six hours after the express brought the king's speech to town, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the most important pamphlet published in the American Revolution – indeed, the most influential pamphlet published in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America – hit Philadelphia's streets. Its central argument was cogent and timely: Reconciliation was not in the best interests of the colonists.
The thirty-seven-year-old Paine was an Englishman who, like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams,
