Common Sense
...published anonymously in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, nine months after the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Eventually selling 500,000 copies, it was an uncompromising call for independence, written in accessible and stirring language, and was instrumental in turning public opinion in the direction of permanent separation from Great Britain. Paine had come to America from England just over a year before he wrote Common Sense. He had grown up poor, with a minimal education, and had gone through a number of unsuccessful careers. He wrote Common Sense while working in Philadelphia as a journalist.
Common Sense
Addressed to the
Inhabitants of America
Man knows no Master save creating Heaven,
Or those whom Choice and common Good ordain.
Thomson.
February 14, 1776
INTRODUCTION.
Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpation of either.
In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the...
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