Today we are going to be discussing certainly one of the

biggest bestsellers in early American history,

and that's Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense.

Before I plunge in to Common Sense,

I am going to answer the question that was asked from

this section of the room on Tuesday,

about how do you vote on voting--the little brain teaser

of the Continental Congress.

And I found the answer to this question.

Okay.

So the answer to the question is: they actually had a pretty

animated debate in the Continental Congress on the

whole voting question, and some people said it should

be according to population and some said,

'Well, you should put property in with population,' and some

people said one colony, one vote.

And with--after apparently arguing for quite some time,

what they realized was they actually really didn't have an

orderly way to figure out population and property worth,

[laughter] and so they ultimately just

decided one colony, one vote, [laughs]

--like, that's all we can do.

And they were really concerned because they didn't want that to

be a precedent.

They were all worried that they'd be setting a precedent

for all time.

So when they wrote it down in the minutes,

they said, we're deciding one colony,

one vote, but not with the idea that it will be a precedent for

all time.

Of course, it then becomes a precedent for Congress under the

Articles of Confederation.

But the answer to the question--how did they vote?--

is apparently someone made a motion--

'I make a motion that we just do the one colony,

one vote thing'--and people just voted on the motion as a

group.

So that is the answer to the question: How do you vote on

voting?

I had not thought about it before and yet historians have

addressed it so there you go so--Okay.

That is the answer to the question.

On to Common Sense, which really,

truly unquestionably was a bestseller.

It actually sold over 120,000 copies in its first few months

in print, and a little bit later in the

lecture I'm going to give you a sense of how that compares with

how some other things might have sold in this time period.

You'll really get a sense of what kind of a bestseller this

was.

And certainly many scholars consider it to be the most

brilliant political pamphlet of the Revolution,

not necessarily for the subtlety of its argument but

certainly for the way in which it's argued,

and I'll talk more about that in the course of the lecture.

So what we're going to be looking at is the pamphlet

itself and what specifically made it so remarkable.

And then we're also going to look some at its author,

Thomas Paine, who he was and how he came to

produce this influential pamphlet.

But I actually want to begin with something that I just--

in my head when I think about Thomas Paine I think about this,

so I feel like I can't start this lecture without discussing

it.

And that has to do with the death of Thomas Paine or

actually, to be more accurate, the body of Thomas Paine.

Okay.

It's one of the sad ironies of history that this person who--

all through this lecture I'm going to be talking about the

great influence of his pamphlet, had this great influence

throughout the Revolution-- and he actually died pretty

much poor and not very much liked by Americans of all

political stripes, more having to do with his

politics later in his life than what he was doing during the

Revolution, but he was not a happy camper

in the years of his death.

But the most horrifying thing about Paine's death has to do

with the question of his body.

Okay.

So Paine first asked about being buried in a Quaker

cemetery, and the Quakers weren't very

excited about that because they were not really hoping to have

that cemetery become a tourist attraction so that didn't work.

So he basically ended up at first being buried on his small

farm in upstate New York.

A few years later a newspaper editor named William Cobbett

decided that what he was going to do was disinter the body and

take it back to England, and then in England they would

set up a memorial to Thomas Paine.

This was his plan.

So he did.

He disinterred the body; he went on a boat;

he and dead-body Paine went sailing back to England.

Got back to England, raised the issue and apparently

did not get very much support for the idea of a memorial of

some kind.

At this point it gets a little sad.

Okay.

So not knowing what else to do--and why at this point he

didn't think to bury him someplace else,

I don't know--but apparently he had the bones put in a trunk and

kept them on his farm for a while.

Okay.

So, body of Paine sitting on his farm in England.

Then he died--Mr. Cobbett died and the trunk and Paine was

passed on to his son, and then his son I guess went

into debt in some way and his belongings began to get

auctioned off and the person doing the auctioning didn't want

to have anything to do with auctioning off a body.

Like, I've never auctioned off a body before,

I don't want anything to do with this--and basically Paine's

corpse disappeared.

We really do not know where Thomas Paine is.

Truly, there was a trunk and it had Paine in it and then it

vanished.

And I went searching today before I gave this lecture,

trying to figure out like--okay, maybe there's been a

recent development in the search for Thomas Paine,

the corpse, and no actually.

Although I did discover that in 2001 there was a society that

wanted to create some kind of memorial here in America and

they decided that they were going to try to trace the body

so they set out trying to trace the body.

What they found was, all over the world are people

who claim to have a piece of Thomas Paine,

right?

Well, his skull might be in Australia but his leg--that

might be in England.

So the sort of--the horrifying end to Thomas Paine is his body

disappeared and perhaps little pieces of Thomas Paine are

floating around as little relics all over the world.

So that's Paine's sort of weird ending,

certainly not the kind of ending that you would wish for

the person who has written the pamphlet we're going to be

talking about today.

And we are given that--what he ended up writing was so

influential and so different from much of what was being

written at this time.

Now as I said at the outset, it's not the great subtleties

of its argument that made it stand out.

And in fact its popularity was due to the very things that were

its greatest strengths: the fact that it was

passionate, the fact that it had a really

simple style, that it spoke to the common

man, that it captured and completely overturned prevailing

colonial ideas about the relationship between the mother

country and the American colonies.

As someone wrote at the time, Paine spoke a language which

the colonists had felt, but not thought.

One of the remarkable things about the pamphlet is that it

was written by a somewhat bankrupt English corset-maker a

mere fourteen months after he had arrived in America from

England.

Basically speaking, Paine knew relatively little

about colonial affairs when he decided to write it.

He wasn't really an established writer.

He had done writing before.

I'll talk a little bit about this today, but he wasn't this

sort of well-known and established writer.

He wrote some for newspapers.

And actually the idea for the pamphlet initially wasn't really

his.

He wrote it at the encouragement of Dr. Benjamin

Rush.

I mentioned that in the first lecture, and I'm going to come

back to that too.

So Paine is relatively new to the colonies,

not really an established writer, so how is it that he

ends up writing this pamphlet?

Well, more than anything else it actually was Paine's

experience of events in the colonies between 1775 and 1776

that inspired what he wrote.

Now let's look for a moment at--to see here what Paine is

experiencing in that year before he wrote the pamphlet.

What is happening around him.

I'm going to talk about this really briefly here because I'll

be talking in more detail about this on Tuesday,

but one thing I will mention here very briefly is,

part of what happens between 1775 and 1776 is the meeting of

the Second Continental Congress.

And that actually begins meeting in the spring of 1775.

I'll talk about the details of the Congress Tuesday.

For now, I'll just talk about the general mindset.

For one thing, no colony instructed its

delegates to this Second Continental Congress to work for

independence.

That was not the agenda.

Delegates were pretty much still acting under the

assumption that they were trying to force Parliament or the King

or someone to acknowledge their liberties and redress their

grievances, and the overall assumption

still was that balance had been thrown off within the British

constitution and it needed to be rebalanced.

So they're talking about trying to figure out a way of balancing

things, maybe a new balance,

but they're not talking about throwing the entire system

aside.

Actually, in the minds of many at the time they probably were

thinking, why destroy what had for a very

long time been one of the most successful political empires in

the world.

John Adams noted in his diary at the opening of the Second

Continental Congress that at what he called an "elegant

supper" at the opening of the Congress,

many representatives and their friends toasted,

quote, "the Union of Britain and the Colonies on a

constitutional foundation."

Okay.

So that's what they're hoping for as this Congress opens.

As an example of this initial mindset of the Congress--

again more about this Tuesday--moderates attempted one

last stab at some kind of basic reconciliation with the Crown,

and they issued what came to be known as the Olive Branch

Petition.

It failed for a number of reasons--again more next week--

one of the most basic reasons being the King refused to read

the Olive Branch Petition, which pretty much is the way to

guarantee the failure of a petition.

By doing that, the King basically gave some

credence to the views of the more radical members of the

Continental Congress, and radicals got even more

credence on August 23, 1775, when the King issued a

proclamation that declared the colonies to be in rebellion,

and then made plans to send 20,000 British troops to the

colonies, including Prussian mercenaries.

Okay, a big change in things, much more detail Tuesday,

but this is important to the setting of Common Sense.

So the King ignores the Olive

Branch Petition.

He's sending troops, not just any troops but

literally hired guns, right?--foreign hired guns to

go to the colonies.

So the colonies have now been declared in rebellion.

An army is coming.

At this point the colonists realize that they need to maybe

take some form of action and make some kind of military

preparation, not in an aggressive way but

certainly in a defensive way.