Begin the world over again

 

Part 2

Thomas Paine’s biographer Craig Nelson suggests, “Today we have almost no idea who he is. People may have known he said ‘these are the times that try men’s souls.’ They may know that he said ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ They may know that he wrote Common Sense but they don’t really know who he is.”

I dare say that for most people, Thomas Paine simply remains another dead and silenced ancestor.

As American journalist John Katz wrote in a 1995 article titled, “The Age of Paine,” “We’ve all been numbed by drowsy history book pedagogy about founders, patriots, and dusty historical heroes. If journalism and the rest of the country have forgotten Paine, why should we remember another of history’s lost souls?”

It’s as though our arrogance prevents us from learning anything from our authentic well documented history; from those, like Paine, who paved the way for our personal freedoms. At great expense, I might add.

To our peril, history has been ambitiously revised; reframed to further an agenda far removed from that of our Founding Fathers. We’ve become a people uprooted, dislodged from credible history.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression, “You can’t make this stuff up,” well, I am here to tell you: they do. Unfortunately, as we have witnessed, “seeded” revisionist fabrications germinate in a soil well-cultivated by an education system obsessed with an ideology–contemptuous of complicating facts–that Paine vehemently fought against.

Paine was the raw, direct, impassioned incendiary the country needed, the spokesman who helped to ignite American values and ideals.

Paine’s 1776 groundbreaking pamphlet Common Sense championed, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind. O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe.”

It’s as though Paine is once again standing atop Fort Lee’s Palisades next to General George Washington, both men witnessing our present day republic being taken captive by opposing forces.

Thomas Jefferson, who regularly exchanged views with Paine, claimed Common Sense “… rendered useless almost everything written before on the structures of government.” John Adams, writing to a friend after Paine’s death in 1809, eulogized, “I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.”

Historian Gregory Claeys, in Thomas Paine, Social and Political Thought, quotes one colonial observer who described Common Sense as bursting forth “like a mighty conqueror bearing down all opposition.”

Appearing in the March 22, 1776 issue of The New-London [Connecticut] Gazette, “To the author of the pamphlet entitled Common Sense: Sir, in declaring your own, you have declared the sentiments of Millions. Your production may justly be compared to a land-flood that sweeps all before it. We were blind, but on reading these enlightening works the scales have fallen from our eyes. Even deep-rooted prejudices take to themselves wings and flee away, tho’ not as an eagle towards heaven. The doctrine of Independence hath been in times past greatly disgustful; we abhorred the principle. It is now become our delightful theme and commands our purest affections.”

“How is Common Sense relished among you? It is eagerly read and greatly admired here. The inability of our enemies to subdue us by force is more and more apparent.” –Dr. Samuel Cooper, eminent Boston Preacher.

Thomas Paine’s forty seven-page pamphlet became America’s first bestseller, with more than 120,000 copies sold in its first three months, and possibly as many as half a million in its first year. This in a country whose population was three million. It is said that newspapers, much like today crammed with controversial viewpoints, scrambled to reprint it. Common people quoted it to one another, hailing it as “replete with truth.”