Bennington Battle Day, 2017

Bennington Battle Day is a state holiday in Vermont to honor of the Battle of Bennington, which took place during the Revolutionary War in 1777. It was the first victory of the colonials of the war.

Common Sense – Thomas Paine

Born in England in 1737, Thomas Paine was born relatively poor, but even with only a grammar school education he was smart and fluent. In London, he attended public lectures about current affairs and met Benjamin Franklin. Like many bright rootless people, Paine hoped for better prospects in the colonies. Franklin wrote a letter of recommendation for Paine, which was a generous act in an age where testimonials opened doors in faraway places. Franklin referred Paine to his son-in-law who introduced him into Pennsylvania society. He became the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine and wrote about the possibility and opportunity of independence from the mother country when almost nobody else had reached that point of thinking.

After the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Paine drew the conclusion that the aims of the colonial revolt had to extend beyond unfair taxation in order to include full independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush urged him to write a pamphlet but discouraged him from using the words “independence” and “republicanism,” advice that he utterly ignored. He wrote for the common man so the argument is not subtle or scholarly. The simple style and easy word choice were powerful enough to convert people’s thinking toward independence or at least provide natural rights arguments for people who were inclining that way.

He put his ideas into a pamphlet Common Sense. By January, 1776, it had become a best-seller, selling over 120,000 in the first few months after it was released. Not bad for a man who had been in the country only a little over a year.

Published in July 1776, he demonstrates the shallow stupidity of monarchial tyranny, hereditary privilege, patronage, and corruption. His irreverence was effective, calling William the Conqueror, “a French bastard.” His scorn is scathing when he asserts, “And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.”

To Paine, since the English Constitution lacked legitimacy, then it naturally followed that independence  was the obvious choice. In the second part, he related what kind of government the Americans could construct. In stirring language he says that colonists could launch a democratic revolution all over the world. It’s not hard to see why his arguments persuaded people to look at their issues in new ways.

Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO PART. Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven.

Paine bragged it was the best seller of all time. JohnAdams, however, didn’t like section on the organization of government, which he thought too democratical. Adams called Common Sense “a crapulous mass,” which is about what we would expect from a thinker who dismissed Plato’s Republic as mere “vaporizing.” It is a fact that Common Sense focused thinking and conversation on independence the summer of 1775, a topic either never spoken of or spoken of in whispers because it was treason.