Thomas Paine: Common Sense

Impact

Revealing why Common Sense would prove so important, Benjamin Rush noted before its publication, “When the subject of American independence began to be agitated in conversation, I observed the public mind to be loaded with an immense mass of prejudice and error relative to it” (Liell, p. 55). This was unsurprising, given that most of the dialogue regarding possible political action was produced by and directed only toward the elite. Circulation and readership of periodicals was low and, most relevantly, limited to the most learned classes. Thus, the common man may have had no more knowledge of the truth behind recent occurrences other than what could be propagated by word of mouth, which one would expect to be slow and fairly circumspect.

Common Sense was first published anonymously, as Paine believed that the pamphlet would bear more of an impact if readers understood that it was not being distributed for any one person's personal gain; he truly wished only that his ideas would become every colonist's ideas. Philadelphia proved an ideal launching pad for the pamphlet, as that city was the most populous in the colonies as well as the most politically active—and indeed, among the elite the pamphlet was rapidly devoured and digested. Within days laypeople and congressional delegates alike were passing the text and their opinions of it to friends, and within a month the pamphlet's third edition was being published.

The relevance of the emergence of Common Sense can perhaps be most readily understood in considering its publication statistics: At a time when the most widely circulated colonial newspapers were fortunate if they averaged two thousand sales per week, when the average pamphlet was printed in one or two editions of perhaps a few thousand copies, Common Sense went through 25 editions and reached literally hundreds of thousands of readers in the single year of 1776.

Indeed, estimates hold that, by year's end, some 500,000 copies were in circulation among a population of only 2.5 million, of which perhaps one-fourth were slaves and largely illiterate. By contrast, in the twenty-first century, if 10 million copies of a given book are published, with America's population near 300 million, the book is considered extraordinarily successful. (These figures perhaps also reflect the characters of the people occupying the region in the respective eras; in the twenty-first century, of course, citizens are far more likely to receive political “wisdom” from television programs.)

Ultimately, with the general populace and the elite alike swayed by Paine's arguments, a political tide in favor of revolution rapidly swept through the nation. Modern historians are virtually unanimous in saying that Common Sense played a major role in spurring the colonists to revolution. Harvey J. Kaye offers a succinct description of the pamphlet's impact in Thomas Paine and the Promise of America: “Whatever its originality in idea and language, Common Sense was radically original in appeal and consequence. Whether it changed people's minds or freed them to speak their minds, it pushed them—not all of them, but vast numbers of them—to revolution” (p. 50). Even contemporary observers, however, were well aware of the pamphlet's importance. In Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, Jack Fruchtman, Jr., cites the words of John Adams: “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain” (p. 78).