Thomas Paine and the Promise of America

I don’t know how long this book has been on my shelf. But Harvey J Kaye has captured the spirit and complexity of the American Revolution.

“Class inequality and contentiousness characterized relations among free white colonials as well. Unhappy reminders of Britain, landlordism and tenantry spread in the colonial countryside. Frontier families felt especially threatened by the propertied of the coastal cities — feelings exacerbated in certain places by religious differences.

“The urban majority, however, was made up of the working classes— artisans and laborers. The master artisans of “mechanics” had their own shops and hired journeymen and apprentices. Literate and often interested in science and public affairs, they aspired to material independence, and community respect gained through hard work, sobriety, thrift, and self-improvement. And yet as much as they stressed individual initiative and responsibility, they readily bonded together in clubs and mutual aid societies and did not hesitate to stand up collectively to authority and seek a greater role in determining colonial developments.”

“Meanwhile, propertless laborers — sailors, dockworkers, hired servants, and the unskilled — increased in number, well aware that they lacked the rights of the propertied and that the rich grew richer.”

“ ‘That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay Christianized, people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising.’ Thus in March 1775 is vigorously called for the abolition of slavery… scolded those tho had the audacity to ‘complain so loudly of attmpts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery’.”

“America’s working classes — farmers, mechanics, laborers, seamen, servants, and slaves — would make the American Revolution a revolution. They would not all realize their dreams, but they would power the struggle, materially, martially, and politically, indeed, at a most crucial moment, literally. The Declaration of Independence, though drafted by a Virginia aristocrat and edited by a committee of colonial gentlemen, issued from the force of Common Sense, authored by an immigrant workingman who would proudly describe himself as a ‘Farmer of thoughts’.”