When Common Sense lit the touchpaper for revolution, Paine was more than prepared to put his money where his mouth is, too. Painting the British king, George III, as a tyrannical power-hungry ruler who had overstepped the mark, Paine made the case against monarchical rule and in favour of democratic government. We should bear in mind the ‘common’ part of ‘common sense’: Paine was trying to reach everyone, regardless of education or social rank. He did this, most of all, not by appealing to scholarly argument or intellectual reasoning but by going for the emotions of his readers (and listeners: many people gathered together to hear someone else read aloud from Paine’s essay). With Common Sense, Paine helped to win over many of those waverers to the cause for independence. He needed to persuade them by showing in powerful and vivid language that Britain was a power-hungry imperial force under whose boot Americans were always going to suffer – unless, that is, they decided enough was enough. So Paine needed to do more than simply lay out the situation to such people. But Thomas Paine sensed that the appetite for a fight was there, if only someone could stir the populace to action and he knew the right way to get the ordinary man and woman on side.

Put simply, many people didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go to war against such a powerful imperial nation as Britain. Nevertheless, in 1775 many Americans living within the Thirteen Colonies still favoured reconciliation with their British overlords. What was it about Paine’s pamphlet that caused such a stir? It was partly good timing: anti-British feeling had been growing in the last few years, especially since Britain introduced a range of taxes in 1763 to help fund their wars in Europe and India such a tax famously led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and the British retaliation that swiftly followed. George Washington wrote to a friend in Massachusetts, ‘I find that Common Sense is working a powerful change there in the minds of many men’.

Paine was soon editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, and in late 1775 began writing Common Sense, which would rapidly cause a sensation throughout the Thirteen Colonies.

Common sense american revolution