OPINION — While Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence turned the smoldering embers of rebellion into the glorious fireworks of independence and revolution, it was a short pamphlet published six months earlier, in January 1776, that ignited the colonies’ revolutionary zeal and crowded out any notion of rapprochement with Britain.
Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” a mere 47 pages long, “swept through the colonies like a firestorm, destroying any final vestige of loyalty to the British crown,” according to historian Joseph Ellis, a prominent Jefferson biographer.
“Common Sense,” as the title implies, is full of practical arguments. The colonies need to declare independence, Paine wrote, because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair. Declaring independence, Paine argued, would turn the rebellion into a war between sovereign states and open the door for a negotiated peace.
