Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the American revolution
Continuing to indulge a form of laziness, what follows is an extract from J.C.D Clark’s Thomas Paine book in which Clark points to the accidental and perhaps epiphenomenal status of the celebrated Common Sense on the American revolution:
For his understanding of the early history of the British empire in North America, especially in relation, to the land claims of the states, Paine cited in all his published works only one source, Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America. It was long out of date: much had changed in the colonies since its first publication in 1708. Even so, Paine showed no sign of having used Oldmixon before the appearance of his own tract Public Good on 30 Decmber 1780; Oldmixon did not inform Paine’s Common Sense (1776). Paine’s account of the impact of Common Sense is telling, ‘It was in a great measure owing to my bringing a knowledge of England with me to America that I was enabled to enter deeper into politics, and with more success, than other people.’ In 1780 Paine offered to return to England, ‘keep himself concealed’, and use his knowledge of America in England’s ‘free and open’ press to convert English opinion to American Independence. This he thought was the area in which he could be of most use. He had good reason to think so.
So Paine stumbled by accident into the American Revolution, an episode that he therefore understood primarily in English terms. He operated more as as catalyst, triggering a reaction while remaining unchanged by it. As will be seen, Paine’s ideas did in some ways develop over his lifetime, but the degree of his evolution has often been overstated; in other ways he retained the ideas he held in 1774. Nor is it clear that Paine’s effect in America was fundamentally to change American opinion. In 1797, the English reformer William Godwin warned an Irish revolutionary of
“an error in your calculation, & that you take the effect of political publications at a higher estimate than perhaps my experience will authorize. It seems to me that the success of such writing very much depends upon the previous preparation of the public mind. Paine’s pamphlet of Common Sense produced a great effect in America, but the bulk of Americans were in a temper considerably congenial to the advices he gave.”
An American historian has argued: ‘Paine did not convert readers. Rather, he legitimated inchoate notions about the abuse of power.’ Another urged: ‘What made Paine’s pamphlet [Common Sense] so compelling…was that, though in many senses original, in its fundamentals it simply expressed what people were already thinking.’
Not transformative, Paine’s influence was in his use. Yes he was used but Clark’s contention is that in this there were gaps between what Paine was saying and what many colonists were saying.
One disjunction Clark observes is between Paine’s arguments against elites - ‘Paine was against all patricians as such, not merely English ones.’ - and a narrower colonial opposition to English elites. Here he references, if with a certain amount of flattening, Eric Nelson’s revisionist history of the American founding The Royalist Revolution, in which Nelson shows that many of the leading colonials actually supported the prerogative rule of the King in the colonies against the claims of Parliament. This too would develop towards independence but the principle of a monarch of this sort did not disappear and was advanced by a persistently influential faction. So, says Clark, ‘the colonial elite was never fully to warm to Paine.’
Ironically, according to Nelson, the success of Paine’s assaults on the sacral claims of monarchy in the popular imagination left an opening for the strong president that would emerge from the constitutional convention. As Nelson observes ‘the new American republic…would evolve and perfect a recognizably Royalist constitution, investing its chief magistrate with the very same prerogative powers that Charles I had defended against the great Whig heroes of the seventeenth century.’
The gaps in understanding owing, contra Paine’s boasts to entering deeper into colonial politics, to the distinctly English context of his thinking, his superficial engagement with the circumstances and his generalising and universalising. What we see, then, is both a reading forward into Paine’s text and a reading back from it. Clark is pushing towards saying something cynical about ideas and politics but this will have to wait.