Common Sense?
Opinion by Ben Everidge for Thomas
Painting by John Trumbull
It’s still a revolutionary idea …
Thomas Paine, an English-born Founding Father of America and a French Revolutionary friend of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, wrote what is considered to this day to be one of the most critical documents leading up to the American Revolution – the treatise, Common Sense.
Published in 1776, Paine strongly advocated as an anonymous “Englishman” that the fledgling United States embrace independence from Great Britain by rejecting the monarchy of King George III in favor of democracy. Paine offered disgusted American colonialists, alarmed at the threat of the King’s tyranny, a solution forward for living a life of liberty.
At a time when many colonialists hoped for reconciliation with Britain, Common Sense demonstrated the inevitability of separation from Great Britain by judging monarchy, especially hereditary monarchy, as a corrupt absurdity. Paine wrote, "thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.”
In Paine’s view, a monarchy violated the laws of nature and human reason, and what he labeled as the "universal order of things," which began, he said, with God. Monarchy, Paine argued, was an institution of the devil.
He further said, “As the exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel expressly disapproves of government by kings.”
Paine, therefore, pleaded with our forefathers, “for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation.” And the colonialists – the revolutionaries of America - did.
