British politicians and philosophers provided the intellectual bedrock for American theories of liberty, but it was a little rabble-rouser who broadcast them throughout the colonies in a way everyone could understand…
That rabble-rouser was a poor English immigrant named Thomas Paine. Paine was a radical. He detested kings, believed in redistribution of wealth, and publicly criticized Christianity in favor of Deism, the belief in an impersonal deity or supernatural force that set the universe into rational physical motion and then stepped aside. His beliefs were shared by many of the most famous framers of the Declaration of Independence, and he would have approved of its impersonal references to “Nature’s God.” His little pamphlet, Common Sense, became an overnight best-seller and was most responsible for popularizing the American ideology of independence and natural rights, the so-called Spirit of ‘76.
Harkening back to the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its English Declaration of Rights, Americans believed that they could only be taxed with their consent, consent expressed through their representatives in Parliament. Without such representation, the British Parliament had no right to tax them. These ideas, simplified and spread by American newspaper editors and pamphleteers like Tom Paine and Ben Franklin, resonated so thoroughly that they generated a grassroots movement. They were not new ideas; they had been incubating in Britain for eighty years because of the writings of liberal English politicians and Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke. The British liberals argued that legitimate governments arose only from consent of the governed—that prior to government, people lived in a “state of nature,” only organizing laws and governments by voluntarily agreeing to limit their individual freedoms in exchange for security.
And it was Thomas Paine, in his pamphlet Common Sense, who explained these ideas to Americans in a way that seemed like simple common sense.
"The History of Our Freedoms" is produced by KEDT-FM in Corpus Christi. Dr. Bill Chriss is a historian and legal scholar. For more on history and the constitution, check out his blog at https://drbillchriss.substack.com/.
