A Summary and Analysis of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense

 By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

After the Declaration of Independence, probable the maximum important and influential report of the American Revolution was a brief pamphlet written now not by an American, however by using an English creator who had been dwelling in America for much less than 15 months.

But even though his u . S . A . Of birth become the very nation – Britain – that Americans have been combating in opposition to to steady their independence, Thomas Paine was maximum of the maximum vast supporters of the American motive.

And Americans have been surely equipped to listen what he had to mention. Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, published at the beginning of that momentous 12 months, 1776, swiftly became a bestseller, with an predicted 100,000 copies flying off the shelves, because it were, earlier than the 12 months become out.

Indeed, in share to the population of the colonies at that point – a trifling 2.Five million humans – Common Sense had the largest sale and stream of any book published in American records, earlier than or on the grounds that. Common Sense, it turns out, changed into fairly commonplace – and really famous.

But what made Paine’s pamphlet of a few 25,000 phrases and forty seven pages strike this kind of chord with Americans in 1776?  Why did Paine write Common Sense, and what exactly does the pamphlet say? Before we provide an evaluation of this landmark textual content, here’s a precis of Paine’s argument.

Summary

Paine’s pamphlet is a polemical paintings, so he is not starting up to offer a balanced and even-exceeded appraisal of the statistics. Instead, he perspectives his position as that of rabble-rouser, stoking the fires of revolution inside the coronary heart of every American living under British rule inside the Thirteen Colonies.

Common Sense is divided into 4 elements. In the primary element, ‘On the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the Constitution’, Paine considers the function of government in abstract terms. For Paine, authorities is a ‘important evil’ because it continues people in test, whilst their inner ‘evil’ may otherwise escape.

Paine then considers the English charter, installed in 1689 in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The principal hassle is that England has monarchy and aristocratic energy written into its constitution: the monarchy is a hereditary privilege which the person king or queen has finished nothing personally to ‘earn’, and the same is proper of folks that sit down within the House of Lords and take part in authorities. (Paine turned into in opposition to all varieties of hereditary power, believing the individual have to earn whatever function they have got.)

In the second component, Paine considers monarchy from a biblical perspective and a historic perspective. Aren’t all men equal when they're created? In that case, the idea that one guy – calling himself king – is extra than his topics, who're but his fellow guys, is defective. He cites various passages from the Old and New Testaments in help of his argument.

For instance, he discusses 1 Samuel 8 in which God punishes the humans for asking for a king. ‘That the Almighty hath here entered his protest in opposition to monarchical government is actual,’ Paine argues, ‘or the scripture is false.’ And few of Paine’s God-fearing readers would agree with that the Bible might be fake in what it showed.

Next, Paine turns from the biblical to the historical argument against monarchical authorities, factor out how past kings had been tricky: as an example, the Wars of the Roses lasted for many years and saved England in a nation of turmoil as  warring royal homes fought for manipulate of the kingdom. ‘In quick,’ Paine concludes, ‘monarchy and succession have laid (no longer this or that state most effective) however the world in blood and ashes.’

Finally, Paine also attacks the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s belief of a ‘mixed country’, a type of constitutional monarchy where the monarch has constrained powers. For Paine, this isn’t enough: maximum monarchs who wish to capture more energy for themselves will find a way of doing so.

The third a part of Common Sense, ‘Thoughts at the Present State of American Affairs’, looks on the struggle between Britain and the American colonies, arguing that independence is the maximum proper outcome for America. He proposes a Continental Charter which might cause a new national authorities, which could take the form of a Congress. He then outlines the form that this will take (every colony, divided into smaller districts, who ship delegates to Congress to symbolize them).

In the fourth and very last section of the pamphlet, ‘On the Present Ability of America, with Some Miscellaneous Reflections’, Paine turns to the practicalities of combating the British, each in terms of cash and assets.

He draws attention to America’s strong navy potential. Shipyards can be used to offer the timber to create a military that would rival Britain’s. Economically, too, America is in a strong position as it has no countrywide debt.

Analysis

Before he arrived in America in 1774, Thomas Paine had a quality collection of failures in the back of him: a onetime corset-maker and customs officer born in Norfolk in 1737, he travelled to the American colonies after Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London, installed a very good phrase for him.

Paine became soon enhancing the Pennsylvania Magazine, and in past due 1775 commenced writing Common Sense, which might unexpectedly cause a sensation at some point of the Thirteen Colonies. George Washington wrote to a friend in Massachusetts, ‘I locate that Common Sense is working a effective alternate there within the minds of many men’

What become it about Paine’s pamphlet that precipitated this sort of stir? It became partly suitable timing: anti-British feeling had been developing in the previous few years, especially because Britain brought a variety of taxes in 1763 to assist fund their wars in Europe and India; one of these tax famously caused the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and the British retaliation that swiftly accompanied.

Nevertheless, in 1775 many Americans residing inside the Thirteen Colonies nevertheless favoured reconciliation with their British overlords. Put clearly, many human beings didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go to war against such a powerful imperial kingdom as Britain. But Thomas Paine sensed that the appetite for a fight became there, if handiest a person ought to stir the population to action; and he knew the proper manner to get the everyday guy and female on aspect.

So Paine had to do greater than clearly lay out the situation to such human beings. He needed to influence them via showing in powerful and bright language that Britain turned into a energy-hungry imperial pressure below whose boot Americans were continually going to suffer – until, that is, they decided sufficient became enough.

With Common Sense, Paine helped to win over a lot of those waverers to the cause for independence. He did this, maximum of all, now not by attractive to scholarly argument or highbrow reasoning but by going for the emotions of his readers (and listeners: many humans collected collectively to listen a person else read aloud from Paine’s essay). We ought to undergo in mind the ‘common’ a part of ‘not unusual sense’: Paine changed into trying to reach absolutely everyone, no matter training or social rank.

Painting the British king, George III, as a tyrannical energy-hungry ruler who had overstepped the mark, Paine made the case in opposition to monarchical rule and in favour of democratic government. When Common Sense lit the touchpaper for revolution, Paine turned into greater than prepared to put his cash wherein his mouth is, too. He enlisted within the American army in July 1776 and continued to jot down pamphlets to reinforce morale all through the years of bloody battle that followed.

Common Sense became famous in America, but it turned into also translated into French and became eagerly taken up there. Indeed, Paine’s innovative name for an anti-monarchical system of presidency could later help to inspire the French Revolution in 1789, which Paine supported in its early degrees. But it become in America that his revolutionary zeal first galvanised others to combat for independence from the monarch who ruled over them.

Fittingly, it was Thomas Paine, writing under the byline ‘Republicus’ in June 29, 1776, who have become the first individual to make a public statement for the new us of a to be named the ‘United States of America’. An Englishman from rural Norfolk had helped to inspire endless Americans to make their u . S . A . Their personal.