A Son of Thunder by Henry Mayer

Author:Henry Mayer [Mayer, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Biography & Autobiography, Political, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9780802198099
Google: QAKQC4a4N2QC
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Published: 2007-12-01T00:25:49+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“I Own Myself a Democrat”

“The time hath found us,” a pamphlet entitled Common Sense announced in January 1776. Offering “nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” this writer fashioned the most compelling argument yet made for continental independence. Henry, along with a hundred thousand other readers, thrilled to find his deepest thoughts expressed in print. “The period of debate is closed,” Common Sense emphasized; “a new era for politics is struck.” “Arms as the last resource decide the contest,” and the hopes we entertained before “the commencement of hostilities” (at Lexington in April 1775) are now as “useless” as last year’s almanacs.

Yet the war had settled into stalemate almost as soon as it had begun. Washington’s raw continental forces had kept General Gage besieged in Boston, but Congress’s hope for the quick military conquest of Quebec had ended in retreat. In March 1776, Gage, too, retreated—to the British base at Halifax, Nova Scotia—but the American command fully expected him to return as part of the major British force expected by the summer.

In the spring of 1776 the continental battle remained a political one. Common Sense fired the imaginations of the committed by joining the issues of independence and democratic government. The pamphlet’s argument rested upon the natural ability of all people to reason and think for themselves. On that foundation, which reached deep into the dissenting traditions of both evangelical religion and Whig politics, the writer boldly attacked the idea of monarchy as tyrannical and unnecessary. Kings did nothing more than give away jobs and make war, he wrote: “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians who ever lived.” Common Sense mocked the idea of the “divine right” of kings, irreverently described William the Conqueror as a “French bastard” who had mobbed the English throne with his “armed banditti,” and castigated George III as “the royal brute of Britain.”

Having stripped the mystique from royalty, the pamphlet insisted, “A government of our own is our natural right,” and it emphasized that simple representative assemblies elected under law would be adequate government for a virtuous, republican people like the Americans. Anything short of independence and republican government would be “patchwork” that only “leaves the sword to our children.” “There is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” the writer argued, for just as nature made satellites smaller than planets, so did nature indicate that England belongs to Europe and “America to itself.” The American cause, Common Sense prophesied, would become the cause of freedom itself. “Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression … O! ye that love mankind,” the writer pleaded, “prepare in time an asylum for liberty.… the birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.”

Common Sense made

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