Thomas Paine’s Common Sense

The political pamphlet galvanized support for revolution. In plain and persuasive prose, Paine – an English-born colonist who had moved to Philadelphia in 1774 – called for independence. Monarchy, Paine argued, was tyranny. A war against Britain, he argued, could be won. “The cause of America,” he wrote, “is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

More than 100,000 copies of Common Sense were printed in 1776, at a time when the total population of the 13 colonies was approximately 2.5 million – making it one of the most popular texts in America.

This copy was printed in late January or early February 1776, probably by the bookbinder Nathaniel Patten, and purchased by a resident of the West Farms or Pautipaug Ecclesiastical Societies – which later incorporated as the town of Franklin, CT. It is bound in a 1769 edition of the New London Gazette. This affordable binding option suggests that the purchaser may have been lower class, though it also could have offered a way to disguise the radical pamphlet.

The pamphlet is in the Franklin, CT Historical Society