Partisan Press

Sam Adams (1722-1803)

• 1760s: Wrote for The Boston Gazette and articles reprinted in other papers
• 1764: Argued that Parliament was imposing too many taxes on colonies
• 1768: Created Journal of Occurrences as the first American news service
• Many items, including rapes, were untrue

Tom Paine (1737-1809)

• Born in England and died in the United States
• Education just enough to enable him to master reading, writing and arithmetic
• Life in England was marked by repeated failures
• Met Benjamin Franklin in London
• Arrived in Philadelphia in November 1774.
• His first regular employment was helping to edit the Pennsylvania Magazine

Common Sense

• January 1776: Common Sense, a 50-page pamphlet that sold more than 500,000 copies within a few months
• Provided basis for the Declaration of Independence

Common Sense

• Most colonists wanted rights as English subjects
• Paine argued that rights should be much broader
• “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
• Argued for independence

Design of Government

• Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one….

Design of Government

• Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one….

Monarchy

• There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

Relationship with Britain

• I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation, to shew, a single advantage that this continent can reap, by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat the challenge, not a single advantage is derived. Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will. But the injuries and disadvantages we sustain by that connection, are without number….

U.S. Government

• A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.

Crisis

• 16 “Crisis” papers issued in the Pennsylvania Journal between 1776-83
• “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.... Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered….”

Final Days

• At the end of the American Revolution, Paine found himself poverty stricken.
• In April 1787 Paine left for Europe
• 1791: Published "Rights of Man," which was a defense of the French Revolution and an analysis of discontent in European society and a remedy for the evils of arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and war

Impact

• Helped launch American Revolution, but seen as too radical
• 1792: Convicted of seditious libel in Massachusetts for The Rights of Man
• Denounced as blasphemer and lecher
• Hometown of Thetford, England, would not erect a statue until 1959
• Teddy Roosevelt referred to him as “a filthy little atheist.”