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By Root 2630 0

of the first American flag. The traditional story – recorded with solemnity in this author’s school books in the 1950s – is that George Washington entered Mrs Ross’s upholstery shop in Philadelphia in 1776, showed her a rough sketch of a flag and asked her to whip up something suitable for a new nation. The story was not first voiced until ninety-six years after the supposed event when one of her grandchildren presented the tale to a historical society in Pennsylvania. It has never been substantiated.6 However, as a little thought should tell us, in 1776 George Washington had rather more pressing matters to engage his attention than hunting down a seamstress for a national flag. In any case, at the time of the story, America was still flying the Grand Union flag, a banner that had alternating red and white stripes in the manner of the modern American flag, but contained a Union Jack where the stars now go. Not until June 1777 did Congress replace the Union Jack with stars. But even then, such were the emotional ties to Britain, many flag makers arranged the stars in a Union Jack pattern.

The upshot is that in early January 1776 – despite the Boston Tea Party, the battles of Concord and Bunker Hill, the revolt over the Townshend Acts and all the other manifestations of popular discontent – Americans were not merely reluctant to part with Britain, but most had never even dreamed of such a thing. Until well after the Revolution had started Washington and his officers were continuing the nightly tradition of toasting the mother country (if not the monarch himself) and the Continental Congress was professing an earnest – we might almost say slavish – loyalty, insisting, even as it was taking up arms, that ‘we mean not to dissolve the union which has so long and happily subsisted between us’, and professing a readiness to ‘cheerfully bleed in defense of our Sovereign in a righteous cause’. Their argument, they repeatedly assured themselves, was not with Britain but with George III. (The Declaration of Independence, it is worth noting, indicted only ‘the present King of Great Britain’.) As the historian Bernard Bailyn has put it: ‘It is not much of an exaggeration to say that one had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence.‘7

Fortunately there existed a man who was a little of both. He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A tumbledown drunk, coarse of manner, blotchy-faced and almost wholly lacking in acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water – ‘so neglectful in his person that he is generally the most abominably dirty being upon the face of the earth’, in the words of one contemporary – he had been a failure at every trade he had ever attempted, and he had attempted many, from corset-making to tax collecting before finally, at the age of thirty-eight, abandoning his native shores and his second wife and coming to America.

However, Paine could write with extraordinary grace and power, and at a time of immense emotional confusion in America, he was possessed of an unusually dear and burning sense of America’s destiny. In January 1776, less than two years after he had arrived in the colonies, he anonymously published a slender pamphlet that he called (at the suggestion of his friend and mentor Benjamin Rush) Common Sense. To say that it was a sensation merely hints at its impact. Sales were like nothing that had been seen before in the New World: 100,000 copies were sold in the first two months, 400,000 copies overall – this in a country with just three million inhabitants. It was the greatest best-seller America has ever seen, and it didn’t make Paine a penny. He assigned the copyright to the Continental Congress, and thus not only galvanized America into revolution but materially helped to fund it.

Common Sense was a breathtakingly pugnacious tract. Writers did not normally refer to the king as ‘a sottish, stupid, stubborn,