https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/06/george-f-smith/the-failure-to-stop-thomas-paine/

The Failure To Stop Thomas Paine
By George F. Smith

The United States, formerly these united colonies, is preparing for its 250th anniversary of its break-up from that era’s Great Satan by reminding us of what brought it about, such as the Battle of Lexington and Concord and subsequent battles of 1775, along with issues that preceded them. In spite of all the bloodshed and fiery tavern rhetoric, most members of the Continental Congress wanted reconciliation from Britain, not independence, even after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on January 10, 1776.

“Nobody whose voice counted within the American colonies,” writes John Keane in Tom Paine: A Political Life, “thought outside the existing terms of the British Empire.” At the same time, the colonists’ “fearless love of English liberties [made] them in spirit more English than the English.”

As Paine’s pamphlet “poured off the presses in a never-ending stream” during the spring and summer of 1776, it not only roused the rabble but swayed key military personnel such as George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, who described it as “working a wonderful change in the minds of many men” while pronouncing its reasoning “unanswerable” and converting him in full to independence. ......