In Our Time - Thomas Paine's Common Sense

Episode Date: January 21, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Paine and his pamphlet "Common Sense" which was published in Philadelphia in January 1776 and promoted the argument for American independence from Britain. Addressed to The Inhabitants of America, it sold one hundred and fifty thousand copies in the first few months and is said, proportionately, to be the best-selling book in American history. Paine had arrived from England barely a year before. He vigorously attacked monarchy generally and George the Third in particular. He argued the colonies should abandon all hope of resolving their dispute with Britain and declare independence immediately. Many Americans were scandalised. More were inspired and, for Paine's vision of America's independent future, he has been called a Founding Father of the United States.With Kathleen Burk Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College LondonNicholas Guyatt University Lecturer in American History at the University of CambridgeAndPeter Thompson Associate Professor of American History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross CollegeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in January 1776 in Philadelphia, an anonymous pamphlet was published entitled Common Sense. Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, it sold 150,000 copies in the first few months, and it said proportionately put the best-selling book in American history. At that time, half the population had either read it or read it, read about it. The writer was Thomas Payne, who'd arrived from England barely a year before, age 37, with nothing but a few piecemeal newspaper articles to his name. He argued, the colonies should abandon all hope of resolving their dispute with Britain and declare independence immediately.

He vigorously attacked monarchy generally, and George III in particular. Many Americans were scandalised, more were inspired, and for Payne's vision of America, America's independent future, he's been called a founding father of the United States. With me to discuss Thomas Payne's common sense are Kathleen Burke, Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, Nicholas Guy at University of Lecturer in American History at the University of Cambridge,

and Peter Thompson, Associate Professor of American History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St. Cross College. Cathy Burke, Thomas Payne was 37 when he left England for Philadelphia. Where was he brought up, and what was he like at 37? Well, he was born in Thetford, East Anglia, in 1737, his interesting because his mother was an Anglican, daughter of a lawyer, 11 years older than her husband,

who was a master staymaker, a corset maker, who was also who was a Quaker. And this is important because his mother took him to church for baptism, but his father took him to Quaker services. And this becomes important later when he has to deal with Quakers in Philadelphia in various ways. he was a self-made man and that was very important because it gave him something in common

with fairly important men such as we'll talk about later Benjamin Franklin he was a staymaker he ran off to see his father holder back he went to the local school he left school at 13 that's right and that's when he then had to become an apprentice to his father

yes the fact that he went to a local school was important because it was a grammar school and therefore he was educated rather more than most staymakers because there was Latin around and he said he didn't. He didn't learn Latin. His father didn't allow him to learn Latin because he thought was a deceit a language which said to deceive the people. Is that not right? Well, that's true. But he also says that he knew what was in all the Latin books at school. So he didn't have to do, he didn't have to conjugate, but he knew what was going on.

He left home possibly away from his parents' influence, but possibly because he wanted to get on in the world. He wanted to see the world. Tried to go off to see. He didn't work. Went off to see later. made money from it, went to London, and London was the center of his life on and off until he left for America. What was important was that he became an excise man, became an excise man twice, but importantly, down in Lewis, this was important as well because Lewis had a vibrant local coffeehouse society, and Payne became a denizen of this. He was well-liked, he was a good man about town, and he debated very well. And when the time came that excise men thought it was time to get

a bit more money, they turned to pain to write the defense of why they needed more money. Exise men were paid by the government. The government did not want taxes to go too high, and therefore he said, look, we're an important part of the country. We need more money, essentially. He went to London. He was sent to London. They all collected money. Sent him to London to try to lobby Parliament. He was in London for two years, and this was actually crucial. This was his first important political pamphlet. Common sense was not his first. It's just in this case he was trying to mobilize support in Parliament, and of course in America, it's to mobilize the masses. But nevertheless, he got a taste for politics, and he had experience in talking and

writing. And crucially is when he became part of a whole intellectual enlightenment society. He went to lectures. He met important people who would be very important in his future, not least of which, of course, was Benjamin Franklin. So we're talking about an autodidact. And this pamphlet he wrote basically said, look, you haven't given us a pay-rise as because of an ex-sise man for a hundred years, which was ridiculously true. He, I mean, an ex-sized man wasn't an easy job. He had to face down smugglers on the South Coast from Lewis, who were basically... were sort of the mafia of the time. Sorry about using basically twice.

And he wrote what was, he put them out on strike and wrote a political document and went to London. The big thing that happened to him in London. Oh, and he'd got some political journalists, he'd got some political journalism in writing in Lewis. Sorry to Russia, but it's a useful background. Right. He got to London and this is the big, big, changing fact in his life. He met Benjamin Franklin.

it. Benjamin Franklin was a totem even then. He was a self-made man, and he more or less adopted pain. He says he was his adopted political son for the rest of the time, but he was part of a whole intellectual and political milieu. And when the government said, forget it, and when he was dismissed from his job as an excise man for being away, he went back home, separated from his second wife, sold all of his goods, and with his money, came back to London. But also, he had nothing more in England. And that's when he decided to go to America.

This was not unusual. A lot of people decided to go to America. Benjamin Franklin was an extraordinary patron. I mean, he was a fellow of the Royal Society. He was a Philadelphia's man in London. He loved the British Empire, trying to keep the two countries together. I have an experiment. We know all the...

But he took this man up, didn't he? He took him up. He appreciated what he could do. Payne now had experience in politics and in writing. And Franklin told him, look, you're a young man, you're a talented man, go to America and make your life there. And I will help you by writing letters for in your help, which he did, which meant that when he got to America, and he'd made so much money, he went first class,

he had already an indirect network that put him straight into the sorts of society in America that he'd enjoyed in London. To pick up, thank you very much, sorry I rushed you there, but we're just about where we should be. Thank you very much. Now, Peter Thompson, let's pick up a stitch that Cathy mentioned, which is his Quakerism. Yes, I mean, Payne is not, as it were, a conventional Quaker, if you can use that word. Towards the end of his life, he expressed a wish to be buried in New York City as Quaker Cemetery. They turned him down because he'd written rights of Irving at the age of reason. which is an anti-religious tract. He famously said, my own mind is my own church.

And he said he wasn't bound by the denominational aspects of Quakerism, but the secular coefficient, the sort of values, the secular values associated with Quakerism were very important in his background. Quakers were radically egalitarian. They believed in the perfectibility of mankind. The inner light resided within all. men. These were values that informed Payne's own democratic practice in everyday life. Quakers were

also markedly anti-authoritarian. They would not bend the knee or bow and scrape to their erstwhile social superiors. They didn't recognize titles of distinction or distinctions of dress. And of course, Payne, in his own way, is a anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment

figure. And like other dissenters, they were banned from going to British universities. They were banned from going to my own university and others, yes. They believed, as I say, in the perfectability of man. People could improve. Now, politically, that's very valuable for Payne, because Payne's argument is that America can succeed. The people of America have the right stuff

to make a republic work. The ordinary men and women, but it's chiefly men, in a city like Philadelphia, have what it takes to express Republican sentiments. But there's a particular serendipity about him arriving in Philadelphia, A, to the intellectual centre of America at the time, possibly the busiest to me. But B, it's a Quaker foundation. It's Penn.

Pennsylvania, that's where they went, and he must have found a lot of like-minded people there. Yes, he certainly did. Penn founded the whole colony of Pennsylvania as a wholly experiment, and the experiment was that if you took the oppressed people of Europe from all different nationalities and all different religions and gave them a fair shake, gave them minimal government,

the result would not be the Tower of Babel, would not be Hobbes' nightmare, a kind of anarchic set of warring factions, but instead would be a city of brotherly love. What are you working out? By 1774, I think it was. It had produced Benjamin Franklin. Pain must have sort of compared to England,

and the corruption and the stock jobbing and petty bickering of the Ancian regime in England, Philadelphia would have looked like heaven. And so he went there and was felt it out and was taken. Franklin gave him wonderful testimonials. This is a important, interesting young man, give him a chance. Yes, Franklin gave him a letter which introduced him to Robert Aitken. Aitken, in turn, gave him a start in journalism. They quarreled. Pain partly because he was a self-made man and partly because he was a radically anti-authoritarian sort of figure, tended to make enemies, tended to quarrel with people. So he hadn't been in Philadelphia for less than a year before he'd published, before he was quarreling with his publisher. But a fairly silly pattern is there. People take him up. He's very, very fond of him. They're very fond of him. Then they get to a point where he can't take him more and he quarrels. That seems to go right through, doesn't it?

Yes, that's right. And I think we perhaps might say... He turns into someone matters of principle, though. That's exactly right. We might talk about this later on, but when he wrote common sense, he said he'd written it to free people from the tyranny of monarchy. Now, because that begs the question, well, what if people are quite happy with monarchy? And Payne's saying, well, if you really thought about it, you'd realize that I'm right. But actually, a lot of people in America and I got were happy with monarchy. A lot of people in America, as I understand it at the time, you know, much more an idea,

thought that the British Empire was terrific. They were pleased to belong to it. They sold themselves as provinces of Britain rather than the word American was not barely used, wasn't around. A lot of their trade, a lot. 40-odd percent of their trade was with Britain. So they thought they were sitting pretty. Well, it's important to understand that for American colonists,

you wouldn't conflate monarchy with what Britain was doing to them in the 1760s and 1770s. That's a very important point. If you think about where the American Revolution came from, in a sense it was the culmination of a long quarrel between the colonists and British officials about the place that America should have within the British Empire. Before 1763, before the end of the seven years war with France, in effect, Britain had run an empire in a much looser way than, say, the Spanish Empire. So if you think about Latin America, it was much more uniformity, a much stronger sense of control from Spain.

With Britain, things were run in a much looser way. Now, for American colonists, they imagined that that looser form of government was quintessentially British. But if you know anything about British history in the 18th century, you'll know that actually Britain's themselves living in Britain saw a different kind of state, a state that was much closer to them. But after 1763, that more British model of governing was applied to what became the United States, the 13 colonies. So the colonists thought, well, the things we've enjoyed up until now, this relative freedom, not too much tax, suddenly they're taxing us, they seem to be intervening much more in our affairs. Why is this happening? Well, why was it happening?

Well, to come back to the point about monarchy, crucially, the colonists assumed that this was something that related to the corruption of Parliament. That this wasn't the decision of the king, but this is something that had gone away from the king. What had gone away from? So this idea of taxing, this idea of denying the liberties of American. So if you follow this thing through, after 1763,

the decision that's made is that American colonies should pay more for the upkeep of the empire. So for the very first time, you begin to have direct taxation in America. If you want to get married, if you want to do legal transactions, if you want to have newspapers, all of those things, you have to pay a direct tax to London. That had never happened before. Why didn't it happen then, then? Because they're trying to pay for the upkeep of British soldiers,

British troops in North America after the seven years' war. So the idea is you can't trust the Americans to become militiamen, to be soldiers themselves. You need redcoats to come over from Europe and they cost money, and it's reasonable to ask the colonists to pay some of that money. But by 1774, when Payne arrives, two things have just happened. One of them is that this is no longer a fight about taxation. This is now a fight about liberty and rights, because in effect, what's happened as Britain has occupied Boston, it's closed down the port, we've had the Boston Tea Party, we had all of these repressive measures.

So that means that the climate politically in America in 1774 is toxic. The second thing that's happened, it's very important for Philadelphia, is that the colonists have come together in what was called the First Continental Congress. And that's happening right just before Payne arrives, right in Philadelphia. So he comes right into the heart of this kind of, you know, this stage of the revolution, which has been building for more than 10 years. But as I understand it, there wasn't so much ferment still even then when he arrived. A lot of people were reluctant. A lot of people thought that it could, excuse me, actually, you know, I'm going to call.

A lot of people thought they could negotiate. A lot of people still thought to be part of that was a good thing. And a lot of people thought, well, what is this America? We're the Eastern Seaboard. So you're talking as if America were united, if it were a lot. Paying gave the word, the United. States, the words of the United States, them, but they weren't there yet by a long way. Well, of course, there are 26 colonies, not 13. And since 1763, you think about the Caribbean

and you think about Canada. So actually, what we think of as the American Revolution is really a revolution of half of the colonies that belong to Britain in North America. But since 1765, since 1964, 1765, there have been efforts to try to unite all of those colonies and protest against Britain. And you're absolutely right that that protest is not initially a demand for independence. To go back to this question about the kids. many American protesters imagine that corruption in Parliament is the reason why Britain is behaving in these ways.

And this is absolutely crucial on the monarchy question because all the way through until 1775, the hope of some of these American protesters is that George III is going to wade into this situation to use the royal prerogative, whereas they call it the Royal Negative, and say, Parliament, no, you're oppressing the rights of my subjects in America.

And of course, what actually happens in 1775 is George III refuses, even to hear their petition. And that's happening at exactly the moment common sense is being written. Yet again, a democratic movement

to puts its trust in the king. It's another little recurrence going through our history, isn't it? Okay, Cathy. How did... So Paines there, when he gets there, you've said,

although you're interested and excited about the idea of being a revolution, there's also a sense of people who are wanted to negotiate their way through this. It's a large sense of that. So that's the sense we've got.

So we're on the case. now. He's going towards common sense. He's in an intellectual circle there. They've taken him up. Benjamin Franklin's best contacts of giving him best contacts, including this physician, Benjamin Rush, who influences him and actually gives him the title of the book, Common Sense. But how did he come to write it, Kathipa? Well, essentially, he already had, in a sense, the ideas. He wanted to turn all these ideas that Nick has been talking about upside down. Rush says that he gave him the title and the idea. But it was, he also says that in October 1775, Franklin, who's now back in America,

says he would like, he wants to do this history of the relationship between Britain and America, and he suggests to Payne that he do it. And Payne says to, well, I was already, you know, the first part of common sense was already done. He wants this, Franklin wants this for the spring. I can actually get it done more quickly. And it will pleasantly surprise him. And so he spends the time between October and essentially late December to write it. He's tasted success at this time, Kathy, hasn't he, by writing for the magazine in Philadelphia, which becomes the best-selling magazine in America.

So he knows how to hit the target in America. One of his articles in that magazine about slavery, the slave market in Philadelphia has caused the Philadelphians to put together the first abolitionist society in the whole of the Western Hemisphere. So he knows how to press the American button at that moment. Well, yes, and Pennsylvania Magazine went from 800 to 1,500 under his editorship, he says. He writes a number of essays, the one on abolition of slavery, is important because it leads,

A, to the first abolitionist society in America, and secondly, it really brings him to the notice of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who is a man who is a radical young physician, and he would rather like to write something on common sense, but he's afraid that he will lose his practice and his chair at the local university. And so he thinks, he tells Payne, you don't really have anything to lose. Could have lost his life, of course, for treason, but that was neither here nor there. But Payne was pleased. You're quite right. He had been writing under various pseudonyms for the previous year and all sorts of topics, sciences and arts and politics. And so therefore, he was an experienced writer. He had already written a political pamphlet. He knew he had studied logic

and rhetoric at school. And all these things came together with his passion. to produce in this what was then 46 pages. A manifesto saying, first of all, you're not as well off as you think. This is what you should change, and this is what you should end up with. So he not only proposes a question, he proposes the argument against what was the accepted, and he produces a solution. Peter Thompson, what's his main argument against the English Constitution before he argues you should get away from it?

What does he think is wrong with it? I think the central point is that government is a necessary evil. Government is the badge of our lost innocence, he says. Society is good, but government is a badge of a lost innocence. So that government should be the servant of the people, not its master. And over time, gradually, the English constitution has developed into this ravening monster, which oppresses the ordinary man and woman in the street, and is fundamentally corrupt.

And the sort of figurehead of that is the king. And it's all very well, John Locke, saying after the glorious revolution, that the king is a sort of umpire who can sort of intervene between the House of Commons and the House of Lords at moments of crisis, and the king has the interests of his subjects and the larger empire at heart. Payne says that's rubbish. And it's not just that George III is somehow deficient in his duties. It's all kings throughout history act in this way.

Monarchy is almost like a sort of biblical curse. And what is needed is for people to strip all this rubbish away and start again from scratch, get in touch with a government that suits their needs, that is their servant, not their master. There's this great idea, presiding idea, maybe not presiding, but current idea that the English constitution is perfect, really, They've got the king, the aristocracy and the commons. These three are in balance.

They keep each other in balance as an equilibrium there, unmatched anywhere in the world. What did you think of that? He thought that was rubbish because it had become corrupt. And you could see, I mean, in his town of Thetford, there were 31 people qualified to vote in a town of 2,500. It was the MP in the gift of the Duke of Grafton. All kinds of things that should have been separate,

separate in a strict constitutional arrangement had become corrupted. There were placement in the House of Commons. There were obviously placement in the House of Lords. The king, by chasing the king's favour, people were deranged from their duty. Can you take that on, Guy?

So this is the attack. He's attack, first of all he sets out, it says this is what government is all about. Society is good, government's about, I'm ridiculously summarising, but that's our job. It's actually, well, no, it isn't our job. It's my job. Your job is to be deep, expensive, thoughtful, in a very short time. Right, okay. But let's go on the Constitution. Then we've turned to that thing. He, it's been mentioned by Peter, but do you want to say any more about his attack on the British Constitution?

I think the role of monarchy is crucial in this. And I return to what I said earlier about how, in a sense, the American political struggle has placed George III as the kind of DeaSX Machina. I mean, he is the person who's going to run onto the state. age and save the Americans from having their liberties crushed. And when it turns out that that's not happening, and it becomes very, very clear at the end of 1775 that George the 3rd will not countenance, even hear these petitions, that's the moment where Payne's attack on not just George the 3rd, but the idea of monarchy itself becomes so powerful. And this is not an attack that anyone has heard before in the colonies, and it's a visceral attack. And it's very rude. Those sections of common sense are extraordinary. I mean, they're still very funny. One of the reasons I think it's worked so well, isn't it's a very funny pamphler. But in talking about how

ludicrous it is to imagine that kings are a good idea, Payne won't even engage with the idea of hereditary succession. He says, if anyone here needs to be told what hereditary succession is a bad idea, well, you know, just go and sit down with the lamb and the lion. I'm not even going to spend any time arguing with you because you're an idiot. So that sense of kind of brashness, that sense of dismissiveness and humor is what makes these attacks on monarchy so crucial and so convincing. I just want to say more about this, which is one more thing, which is, that he's so clever in the way that he uses religion to attack monarchy, which on the face of it is astonishing,

because in a way the Old Testament's full of kings. I mean, you know, the monarchy is an Old Testament institution. Pain says actually that the Jews in the Bible erred at the moment they chose to have a monarch and that God punished them for it. And that the good monarchs in the Bible, people like King David, well, they were good men. They weren't good because they were kings. And people like John Adams and other critics were furious with pain

for claiming... John Adams is an American politician and the second president of the United States. And in a way, Payne's big intellectual rival in 1776. They were absolutely furious these critics with pain for pulling out of the Old Testament the idea that monarchy could be bad. Yes, I mean, I want to just jump in there, Nick,

on the idea that the Old Testament was full of kings. I mean, why would you need a king? If you were a conservative, conservative-minded person in the 18th century, you would assume that man is passionate and prone to violent behavior and that you need some figure that will sort of glue society together

and a monarch serves that function. He's the father figure of the nation. People look up to him and suddenly what would be the crooked timber of humanity would be straightened out by this figure. And obviously that has biblical resonances, but also take it from the Bible, he takes the idea, pain takes the idea that no, man is not violent and passionate. He is a man capable of reason and that what can glue society together can be sentiments held in common, common sense,

a concurrence of sentiment, the fundamental harmony that exists between the farmer who grows his wheat, the merchant who sells it, the shippers who ships it off to the West Indies and some sort of it, a harmonious, you know, based on Newtonian principles. So hence a sort of break with biblical tradition. Very pleased you brought Newton in because his science education was very important to him, but we're going to move to America, kind of. So the current state in America, he enters into this argument. The third part of his book is saying,

tell us what the third part of his book is saying on this pamphlet. He's actually looking at what's happening in America and what America is like. He says, essentially, look, in the olden days, the empire was a good thing. When everything else was tyranny, it was golden. This is no longer the case, as Nick described. And he says, why should you like the empire? Well, there's trade and there's protection. Trade, all right, but we can trade with the rest of Europe if we want to.

It isn't dependent necessarily on Britain. Fear. Well, if Britain has ships along the coast, they can oppress us. If they're far away, they can't get here in time. We have to depend upon ourselves, that fear isn't enough, that this is a continent. That's an island. How can an island control a continent? What we need is unity.

Pain is saying this. In common sense, in fact. He's saying that, look, we can do it ourselves if we're united. There's no point in putting it off. Things aren't going to get any better. We must do it now whilst we're young and in disarray. Interestingly, he's sort of become an American, hasn't it, really? in his head?

He says elsewhere that he's an American, that he's no longer, he's not British, he's no longer an Englishman. That's why he's so cross when his publisher puts the first edition, there's the publisher's name and then it says written by an Englishman. And in his own second edition, right, it's Thomas Payne.

But essentially, he goes for unity because he's quite aware that you've got Massachusetts and Virginia, which are rebellious, and you've got New Jersey and New York, and Georgia, who are a loyalist, and he says, look, you have to come together. And what you need, he also says,

look, I know you're afraid because you don't know what's going to come afterwards. What you do is you have each of these provinces, each of these colonies, has their own assembly, a one chamber assembly, you all pick delegates, you go to a continental assembly,

you write a charter based as he invokes Magna Charter, as he says. And therefore, and you don't need a king, you need a president which is elected. In other words, you elect a one chamber, and he says so they can keep coming back and find out what the people say,

and they're representatives of the people. And therefore, he says, look, don't worry about Britain. You can take care of yourselves, and this is how you can do it. It's extraordinary, Peter Thompson, because he is at that stage driving the intellectual part, the intellectual dynamic,

and the nerve. He's building up the nerve. seems to me, you tell me if I'm wrong, please, it would be very helpful. He's building up the nerve of the American resistance. He's saying, come on, you can do it, and this is why I can do it, and on these grounds you can do it, and what's to stop you? Yes, I mean, he's imagining the future.

That's good, that's right. We have it in our power to begin the world anew. You know, that's a sort of key sound bite from common sense, which I hope people will read after this programme, because it's a great, it's a great read. Yes, Kathy began by mentioning America, and you mentioned

America just now. For Americans, residents of the Eastern Seaboard of what became the United States, America in 1776 would be more likely understood as a pejorative term. American equaled provincial, rustic, rubic,

unsophisticated in comparison to London or Paris, with no justification whatsoever I might add, but that's the understanding. And when people talked about my country, when George Washington talked about my country, he meant Virginia. not what we know of now as the United States of America. So Kathy was talking about his plan of government,

and what's significant about that is it's national. The conception of it is national. You just have a simple, national unicameral assembly. We're elected by the people, and that is operative on all inhabitants of the United States. When three-fifths of that assembly votes in favor of a, particular measure, says pain, that would become law throughout America.

Only a Lucifer himself would take up arms against a government thus constituted. Now that's a real problem, given the facts of America. Some states have slavery. For example, some are on the way to ushering slavery out. And Americans feel that they need the protection

of their soon-to-be independent state governments. So he's giving them a state to aim at, really. imagining it, as Peter said, the writing of the book, I mentioned at the top at the very beginning of the program, it sold colossally.

Nobody thought, he didn't think it would sell a copy, did it? Anyway, it sold enormously and was read widely, and wild estimates have said, had it come out now, it'd be, in America, it'd sell 150 million copies, literally, or be read. So there we are, really.

What What was it about the writing that attracted people to it? I think I would say, in terms of the intellectual content, one can talk about him being in the vanguard of the intellectual part of the American Revolution. In some ways, it's not a terribly intellectual book, by which I mean if you think about other theorists and other protesters, they'd be going back through their volumes and looking for their Montesquieu and their lock and trying to come up with this sort of, you know, quotations version of why America needed to be independent.

Payne got rid of all of that. famously, Payne didn't like quotations. So Payne grasped this idea in a way that intellectually, the revolution had already happened. And I think it's crucial to remember that at the start of 1776, the revolution was far from a given thing. That's right. I think that's what I've been trying to write in my fumble-minded way to hint at. In two ways. You've spoken before about the fact that there is intellectually amongst many people in the colony still a reluctance to go that final mile to independence. But also militarily, the revolution's already begun. So Americans have been finitely.

the British since April of 1775. And that winter, there's a particularly unsuccessful US effort to invade Canada, the first instance of regime change, if you will. And in that very awkward encounter with Canadians who don't rally to this new American revolution, pain really sees a moment where he has to bolster people's spirits behind revolution. He does that not with quotations, not with political theory, but with what he calls common sense. And I think it's that accessibility of the book that makes it so popular. It is extraordinary, isn't it?

Around this period off, the way he gets into people's mouths. I mean, that pamphlet he writes in the battle that Washington's going to go when he goes across the Delaware River. This is a time to test men's... To tryman's souls. He walks 33 miles, writes the pamphlet, walks 30, gets back 18,000 copies just as they're about to attack. They all take it into battle. But they're saying it as they're going to battle.

And Barack Obama said it in his inauguration. Yes, we can all come up with all sorts of... Graham Beck said it, Glenn Beck. I think, well, there's a couple of things that are important. First of all, the reaction. I mean, you've mentioned the $150 million, whatever. But there's a reason for that. It's not just that he's saying what people are beginning to think,

because this is not the case. There's quite a mixed reaction to this. Some people, I mean, Washington says it changed men's minds, and Franklin said it was wonderful. And those who believed in it, in the elites, were forced. it. Those who didn't, there was an awful lot of action against it.

But what we have to keep in mind, first of all, he repudiated the copyright so it was published up and down the seaboard. It was published in Europe from London to Vienna to Moscow. And the crucial thing, he did not use the semicolon, which is the mark of the 18th century

as far as I'm concerned. I just want to relish that. Thank you very much, God. My pleasure. I mean, the important thing is... Right. We exist to provide sport for our neighbors, Melvin. The crucial thing is that he wrote it not only to be read but to be said

because it was Knockabout prose. I mean, Nick makes this point, but it's knockabout. It's short sentences, it's declarative sentences, it's things, but of course you agree with me. Of course we believe this. And not only did people read it, but people listen to it because we forget sometimes that it would go to these coffee houses and someone would read it to everyone.

So the reason that it's so important is not only the people are reading it, but people are hearing it, and he writes it to be heard as well as to be read. Exactly like Tyndall's translation of the New Testament. Absolutely. Which is written to be read, to be understood by the illiterate plow boy.

That's right. So he wrote a speaking book. Nick, the first and second President of the United States, Washington the first, Adam's the second, disagreed strongly over pain. Can you tell us how? partly because the, well, Payne, as I say, did not understand the prior attachment that Americans had to their colony, now independent state. You know, the attachment the Virginians had to Virginia.

He thought that was rather irrational and did not see any kind of constitutional theory whereby having just thrown off one distant government in Whitehall, Americans would now suddenly want to create a new distant government and national assembly. He didn't see any use for the states as a kind of buffer between a sort of national government and more local forms of government, including the states. So that's one area of disagreement. The other area concerns commerce. Pain, in many ways, for all his utopian side, is pretty traditional. The America he had in mind would look like Britain without a king and without the House of

of Lords, and certainly without the Church of England or any of that sort of thing. But in other ways, would look rather like England. Our plan is commerce, he said. America will never be poor as long as eating as the custom in Europe. We'll have a national debt. A national debt is a national obligation. We'll have a national bank. Now, Washington and the political party that became known as the Federalist tended to sort of agree

with this, but there were plenty of people associated with Jefferson who didn't. Can we develop that day? Can we talk about the Washington and Adam's clash? Well, let's go back into 1776. When it was published, you sometimes read in books, this had an incredible, amazing effect. And so yesterday I decided to go off and check this. And there's a great way of doing it because the US government has put all of the papers of the founding fathers online. So if you go to founders.archives.org.gov, you can actually go off and read Washington's papers, Hamilton's papers, Jefferson's papers. The incredible thing is, it seems to be true. You see in real time, as it were, in February and March and April of 1776,

these founding fathers talking about the incredible effect this pamphlet was having. Washington in particular thought this was, as he put it, unanswerable. And because he was looking to try to persuade people to volunteer for the army at that point, this was a particularly useful recruiting tool for him. John Adams, on the other hand, had real reservations about this. So Adams, as a Boston lawyer, came from a very famous family, was constitutionally or politically much more conservative than Payne. And he was alarmed at Payne's suggestion that you would only have one house,

you'd have annual elections, it would be too democratic. So in a sense, Adams begins this long, I mean, he's still talking about this 40 years later, this long campaign to try to undermine that side of Thomas Payne. So it's crucial to think about common sense as having two big arguments. One is that America should be independent. So that's really an anti-colonial revolution. The other is it should be much more democratic. that's a political revolution.

And in effect, you have to understand the American revolution that's containing two sets of arguments, one about how big the British Empire should be, should America be independent from it, and the other one, how should it be governed? And Payne is always the radical on that second question. And Adam's stuff, he writes something about the Constitution and he stuffs his book with quotations,

classical quotations. Okay, so Adam's claims that Payne runs into his house in Philadelphia in the spring of 1776, and Payne is furious with Adams, because Adams has just written a pamphlet called Thoughts on Government. And so Adams tells this story a lot at the end of his life. And Payne says, how could you possibly write this pamphlet proposing we have a strong executive, a bit like a king, an upper house, a bit like the House of Lords, and a lower assembly,

the British Constitution. How can you say in your pamphlet we should have that right now? And Adams turns around and says, how can you say that the Old Testament says there shouldn't be monarchs? And Payne apparently says to Adams, oh, I don't believe any of that stuff. I don't believe the Old Testament. I don't believe than you, and I'll write about it, but probably a bit later in my life. Kathy, you want to come in? No, it's just briefly, I think what's very important in terms one reason,

Washington and the other radical radicals, like it, is because in a coincidence for which writers can only dream, on the 9th of January, the advert for pains, for common sense, appears in the same paper as the news that the king in Parliament, the previous October, had said, these people are going for independence, and we must use all exceptional measures that can be done. So it's important against the king,

but it's also important for setting the stage that mobilizes this support for Washington and for actually going for independence. Is there a sense in which Payne can rightly be called one of the founding fathers of the American Movement for Independence? That depends on how you define a founding father. Certainly for a couple of centuries, the idea was founding fathers,

fathers were those who made the revolution, I mean, the Declaration of Independence and codified it, that is to say those who signed the Constitution. Lately, it's been expanded for democracy so that the whole revolutionary generation. So if you believe in that pain is, if you believe they have to sign, he's not. Can I have a stab at that? I mean, without sounding Trixie, it depends what you're founding, right? So Payne wasn't at the, he gave America a sense of purpose. He gave it a sort of mission statement.

You get it language as well. Yeah. I mean, a lot of echoes of his words or his actual words are used in the argument from then on, not that? Even when Payne had become notorious for his political and his religious views, there was still an effort to recognize him by other founding fathers for what he'd done. So after the revolution, Jefferson, Madison, and also George Washington are keen to try to get some money to Payne because they know he's never made money from common sense. He sold it and didn't make a penny from it.

Now then, in fact, if I can speed around the track before we come to an industry, are doing, he then tried to build bridges, failed, became part of the French Revolution, objected to the guillotine of the king, just escaped being guillotined himself, tried to stir up everything in this country, came back to America, wrote two more great books, the rights of man, the age of reason,

both of them massively important, big bestsellers, we may come back in a year or two to talk about those, but at the end of his life, He was impoverished, neglected, isolated. He had a sort of, not a pauper... Quakers, as you said earlier, wouldn't bury him. He had a sort of paupus funeral in the garden of his own little shack up and La Rochelle and six people attended.

Now, how did that come about, Cathy? It came about because of age of reason in particular, because it was so anti-Christian that most people react, you know, reacted against it. And he'd been involved in the French Revolution. There's nothing so conservative as those people who have had a revolution want to keep it that way. He was no, being radical was no longer such a good thing. And so he had besmirched himself in Europe.

And he came back, you're quite right. He drank too much. He didn't have much money. He retired to his farm at his burial. There were only six people. And his housekeeper stood at one end and told her son to stand at the other end because no one else was there to celebrate this great man. And then his bones.

Can I talk about his bones? We have in time. We can talk about his bones later on. when we come back in Eritus time, I hope you all three come back to talk about the one or two or both of the other books. Thank you very much. It was a great rush, but I hope the great rush was worth it. Thanks to Cathy Burke, the guide and Peter Thompson.

Next week, we will be talking about Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most powerful woman in 12th century Europe, Queen of France, Queen of England. And, well, thank you very much for that. Excellent. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material. from Melvin and his guests.

Anyway, what didn't we say? What did we get wrong? Come on, you're still on air for this podcast. I still think, may I talk about the bones? The bones is interesting, but we hadn't time for the bones. I know, the bones, the point is the radical Cobbett over in England, rural rides and so forth, decided this was awful. He thought pain was great. He came over sort of in the middle of the night.

He and a couple of friends with shovels came and dug up, Payne and put him in a box and took him back to England and then no one would give him any money for a great monument so he stuck him in a box in his attic when he died parts of it went rather like Saints relics went to various people

and then they went to the rag and bone men and no one knows what happened to Payne's bones so he started in obscurity and he ended in obscurity there's a strong rumor that they're in Liverpool some of them surface there, didn't they?

Yeah. Perhaps his knucklebone in his... I'm sorry. No, not to all. In terms of what we might have left out, perhaps we should talk a little bit about contingency because we've made

him sound a little bit seamless. In a couple of ways. One of which is that it was he met Franklin at a time when Franklin had really just being humiliated by in a really atrocious display of ministerial arrogance. Franklin's 68 years old

the inventor of the Lightning Rod, the Franklin stuff. He was representing New York and sorry, Massachusetts, the colony of Massachusetts who asked for the royal governor to be sacked. And the Privy Council staged this sort of show trial where they made Franklin stand up for two and a half hours. Wasn't he allowed to sit down? Where he was rang for his impertinence

in even supporting presenting this petition. And that, quite understandably, convinced Franklin that the game was up, right? From now on, there's no reasoning with these people. And it's at that moment that he met pain. And there's a lot of snobbery in that around. There is. Terrible snobbery.

I mean, he could have eaten all of a breakfast intellectually. Yeah, absolutely. They hired Alexander Wedderburn who had had elocution lessons to disguise his Scottishness. That's contingent. Can I jump in on that just for a second? I mean, so, I mean, one of the things we did in the program was suggested there was this big difference between Britain and America in terms of intellectual culture. And in effect, someone like Benjamin Franklin had been living in Britain for nearly 20 years before the American Revolution.

We talked about Benjamin Rush. He was educated at Edinburgh and spent some time in London. So actually there was a kind of, I think the distinction between Britain and American in terms of intellectual life, you really wouldn't have made it. And if you did, Americans would go to Britain to realize themselves as intellectuals. So in a sense, pain walked out of one world into another world that wasn't so different intellectually. Could I say one thing we didn't also we didn't mention is there's a different, not aristocracy. Well, I suppose, so their merit, its merit becomes important, not birth, not where you came from.

But you make, I mean, that's the point of Franklin as well as pain. You have brains, you have, you work hard and you raise yourself by your own efforts. And this is very different. And it's one way that that brings together pain and Franklin as well. But the whole idea of a meritocracy. is something that's very important at that time. And again, it upends what most people think of as an aristocracy. Yes, I mean, the historian Gordon Wood put this very well,

that before the revolution, people talked about their family lineage and how grand their lineage was. After the revolution, they talked about how common they were. There are many more history and discussion programs from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk. slash radio four.