Eric Wilson RHS Executive Director
Revolutionary
Moments: ‘Common Sense’ at 250
Editor’s note: The following article was written by Virginia Military Institute history professor Lt. Col. Mark Boonshoft, the seventh in this series of “Revolutionary Moments,” sponsored by the Rockbridge Historical Society and the regional committee for VA250: American Revolutions. Spanning a range of historical themes and events, articles in the series will be published periodically over the next three years to extend those commemorative reflections across four centuries of America’s revolutionary legacies.
No single piece of writing did more to push the 13 colonies to independence than Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Published initially in Philadelphia in January of 1776, the pamphlet eventually arrived in Virginia. By April of 1776, George Washington had received several letters about the pamphlet from Virginians and concluded “common sense is working a powerful change there in the Minds of many Men.”
And yet, no “founder” had a more controversial legacy, and no pamphlet was more criticized, even by other patriots. John Adams described it in 1819 as a “crapulous mass.” Why?
It was not because Paine advocated for independence. He timed that argument well. The Revolutionary War had been going for nine months. The Continental Army was laying siege to British-occupied Boston. Many soldiers’ enlistments were running out. It was an uncertain moment. Paine made the clearest case that independence was the right move, and the North American colonies would be better off without Britain.
Instead, it was Paine’s arguments about government that raised eyebrows. Paine attacked the concept of monarchy. The best evidence “of the folly of hereditary right in Kings” is that it so often gave “mankind an Ass for a Lion” [the lion was the symbol of the English King].
This would not be controversial in and of itself; Americans were forcefully overthrowing a King, after all. But Paine’s digs at monarchy were part of a larger attack on Britain’s mixed constitution, which balanced the one (the King), the few (the Lords), and the many (the Commons). He thought it necessary to forsake the past. Any veneration for the British system would cloud Americans’ judgment about their future: “as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.”
Paine proposed radical ideas. He supported single-branch government — merely a modern-day assembly at the state level and the House at the national level. He wanted annual elections. He wanted to ensure fair and direct representation.
And so, in his original plan for a continental government, Paine argued there should be no fewer than 390 members of the Continental Congress. These 390-plus people would represent the approximately 2.5 million people in the 13 colonies-turned-states. He had little patience for things like indirect elections, “checks” on the popular will, or concentrations of power in individual leaders. The “president” in his scheme for government would be chosen from and by the members of the legislature, to serve for one year, and would not have distinct power.
As Paine put it: “in America the law is king.” That was a reaction to European monarchies, “absolute governments,” in which one person, “the King is law.” It was his advocacy of “democratical” (as they would say at the time) forms of government, rather than something balanced, that frustrated men like John Adams.
The Adamses of the world won. Perhaps most notably at the time, but often lost on us now, the House of Representatives was so small that people like Paine thought it hardly popular. The first House of Representatives consisted of 65 members, well shy of Paine’s proposal for 390.
We now only have 435 members of the House to represent nearly 350 million people. And under the original Constitution, only the House of Representatives was directly elected. Still today, the president is elected indirectly through the Electoral College, federal judges are appointed, and until the 17the amendment in 1913, state legislatures appointed senators.
In other words, the form of government in the U.S. Constitution, which we take to be one of the Revolution’s main legacies, looks drastically different than the plan to institutionalize revolutionary republicanism, as proposed by the most effective advocate of American independence, Thomas Paine.
