Made In America - Bill Bryson [24]
Jefferson freely acknowledged that his own prose style in the Declaration of Independence was indebted to Paine, whose ‘ease and familiarity of style’ he thought unrivalled. Others were less convinced. Benjamin Franklin believed Paine’s writing lacked dignity. Gouverneur Morris dismissed him as ‘a mere adventurer’s. John Adams, never short of an acid comment, called Common Sense ’a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass’, and likened Paine to a common criminal. But the book had the desired effect.
Paine’s value was not as an originator of ideas, but as a communicator of them. He was a consummate sloganeer. In Common Sense and a flurry of following works, he showered the world with ringing phrases that live on yet: ‘the Age of Reason’; ‘the Rights of Man’; ‘That government is best which governs least’; ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’; ‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot’. Less poetically but no less memorably, he was the first to refer to ‘the United States of America’. Previously even the boldest patriot had spoken of the ‘United Colonies’. Under Paine’s influence Americans became seized with what one British onlooker uneasily termed ‘a Democratical phrenzy‘9
It is easy to forget that those who started the Revolution did not think of themselves as Americans in anything like the way they do today. They were British and proud of it. To them, American was more a descriptive term than an emotional one. Their primary attachment was to their colony. When Jefferson wrote to a friend that he longed ‘to return to my own country’, he meant Virginia.10 In 1765 Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina lamented: ‘There ought to be no New England men, no New York, etc., known on the Continent, but all of us Americans.‘11 That he felt it necessary to articulate the sentiment is revealing.
Their exposure to other colonies was often strikingly limited. John Adams, for one, had never left his home colony. In 1776 Philadelphia was the second largest city in the English-speaking world, but more of the delegates to the second Continental Congress had been to London than to Pennsylvania. Despite the interposition of two thousand miles of ocean, London remained the effective centre of American culture and politics. As Garry Wills has noted: ‘Till almost the eve of the Revolution, resistance to imperial policy was better schemed at in London than in the colonies ... London [was] where policy was made and colonial protests directed, where colonial agents were located and a community of Americans from the whole continent resided.‘12
In Philadelphia, they convened in a spirit of excitement mixed with high caution. Though they came from similar backgrounds nine of Virginia’s twelve delegates were related by blood or marriage13 – they were wary of each other, and not without reason. They were engaged in treason and anyone who betrayed them would have much to gain. The step they were taking was radical and irreversible, and the consequences terrifying. The penalty for treason was to be hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled and forced to watch your organs burned before your eyes, then beheaded and quartered.14 Widows would be deprived of their estates and children subjected to a life of opprobrium. Benjamin Franklin was no more than half jesting when he quipped to his fellow delegates – and here at last we have a remark that appears actually to have been uttered – ‘We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.