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Tom Paine’s pen slew slavery & tyranny
Fresh off the boat from England in 1775, Tom Paine published an article on the most pressing problem he saw in the 13 colonies: “African Slavery in America.” At the time, mainstream opinion — northern and southern — still supported human bondage. Moderate critics of slavery advocated gradual emancipation followed by the deportation of free blacks. Paine, however, urged colonial legislatures to liberate bondsmen immediately and grant them jobs and land to give them a solid stake in American society. Several weeks later, he became a founding member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
Early the next year, Paine wrote Common Sense, a massively influential pamphlet that decisively shifted colonial opinion toward separation from Britain. Before Common Sense, most Patriots aimed their ire at Parliament while professing continued loyalty to king and country; some continued to hope George III might take mercy on his American subjects and find some way to accommodate their needs within the empire. As an antidote to this silly delusion, Paine underscored the king’s complicity in the colonists’ plight and mercilessly mocked hereditary monarchy as an inherently absurd institution: “Of more worth is one honest man to society than all the crowned ruffians who ever lived.”
Few propagandists enjoy such immediate gratification: Six months after the publication of…
