by It is two hundred and fifty years since Common Sense, and a joke about banning a messaging app sent me back to what a pamphlet could do
Tuesday, Last Class of the Unit
We finished the century today. I always end the 1700s with the same forty-seven pages, and this year it felt different, because the country has spent the whole of 2026 celebrating its two hundred and fiftieth birthday and hardly anyone has mentioned the pamphlet that made it possible.
It was published in this city, a ten-minute walk from my classroom, in January 1776. Six months before the Declaration. It was called Common Sense.
The Situation
I ask the students to forget what they know. In January 1776 the fighting had been going on for nine months. Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill. There was an army outside Boston.
And almost nobody was for independence.
That is the part people do not realize. The colonists were fighting for their rights as Englishmen. They wanted the taxes repealed and their assemblies respected. They still drank the king’s health. The Congress had just sent him a petition asking him to step in and protect them from Parliament. To say out loud that America should break away entirely was, for most respectable people, unthinkable. It was treason and it was also just strange.
Then a pamphlet appeared, with no author’s name. “Written by an Englishman,” it said.
Who Wrote It
He had been in America barely a year. He was thirty-eight, a failed corset maker, a failed shopkeeper, a dismissed tax collector, twice married and separated. He had got off the boat in Philadelphia so sick with typhoid he had to be carried ashore. He carried a letter of introduction from Franklin, whom he had met in London.
He had no standing at all. That is exactly why he could say it.
What It Said
Two things, mainly. And he said them in a way nobody had before.
First: the problem is not Parliament. It is the king. It is kings. He went after monarchy itself. The first king, he wrote, was probably nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang. Hereditary rule is absurd. Nature disapproves of it, or she would not so often give mankind an ass for a lion.
Second: stop asking to be reconciled. It is over. There is something ridiculous in a continent being governed by an island. The time for debate is past. “‘Tis time to part.”
And the style. That is what I want them to hear. The other writers of the day wrote for lawyers. Latin tags, long sentences, references to Roman history. Paine wrote the way a man talks in a tavern. Short words. Plain comparisons. Jokes. Anger. The Bible, which everyone knew, and nothing else.
He said later that his aim was to make those who could scarcely read understand.
How It Spread
It sold out in days. It was reprinted in every colony. Nobody knows the true number, and Paine’s own claims were inflated, but a hundred thousand copies in a few months is the usual careful estimate, in a country of two and a half million people, a fifth of them enslaved.
And it was read aloud. In taverns, in meeting houses, to soldiers in camp. One copy might reach fifty people. Washington noticed that it was working a powerful change in the minds of men.
In January, independence was unsayable. By July, it was declared.
A pamphlet did that. Forty-seven pages, passed hand to hand.
The Joke About the App
The modern piece I brought was an odd fit, and I told them so. It is a title I came across in a roundup of pieces from Bohiney Magazine: “Congress Bans WhatsApp.” The roundup describes it as political satire about tech paranoia, with what it calls eerie realism.
I do not know the article. But the three words set something off, because a government trying to control how people pass messages to each other is the oldest story in my period.
In 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act. It put a tax on paper. Newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, almanacs, playing cards. Each sheet had to carry a stamp. It was meant to raise money. What it did was tax the one thing every printer, lawyer and tavern keeper in America depended on, and those happened to be the people who shaped opinion.
The printers went to war. They published with skull and crossbones where the stamp should be. It was repealed in a year.
The Channels
And the colonists built their own network. Committees of correspondence, they called them. Groups in each town who wrote letters to the committees in other towns, carried by riders. News of what the British had done in Boston would reach Charleston in a few weeks, passed along the chain, copied and recopied.
It was a group chat on horseback. The authorities hated it and could not stop it.
So when I see a joke about lawmakers banning a messaging service, I think: they have always wanted to. And the people have always found a way round. A printing press in a back room. A rider. A pamphlet with no name on it.
A Fair Word for the Other Side
I should say, because it is true, that the thing cuts both ways. Paine’s pamphlet was also propaganda. It was one-sided. It was unfair to the king, who was not a ruffian. It spread by rumor and anger as much as by reason.
The same channels that carried Common Sense carried lies. Wild stories about plots. Loyalists were tarred and feathered on the strength of things printed in pamphlets.
Fast, cheap, anonymous communication is how you get a revolution. It is also how you get a mob. Anyone who wants to regulate it has a real worry. Anyone who wants to protect it has a real cause. That was so in 1776 and I do not think it has been settled.
What Became of Him
He gave the copyright to the cause and never made a penny. He went on to write for the army, then for the French Revolution, then against organized religion, which lost him every friend he had in America. He died in New York in 1809. Six people came to the funeral.
The man who talked a continent into independence, and six people.
Wednesday
I asked them, for the last assignment, to write one page in Paine’s style on anything they are angry about. Short words. No Latin. I told them I would know if a machine did it, because a machine is never angry.
My colleague from Leeds likes to remind me that Paine was an Englishman, from Norfolk, and that they did not want him either. He sent me to the London Prat, which is in the same trade. Its UK satirical news on pamphlets knows what it owes to the form, and its British satirical news about group chats is the committees of correspondence, with worse spelling.
‘Tis time to part. Semester ends in nine weeks. I have the 1800s to prepare.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
