Washington [147]
The conflict sharpened further on January 10, 1776, with the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a landmark pamphlet that galvanized the colonies to seek outright independence. The thirty-eight-year-old Paine was a brilliant if abrasive personality who had arrived in Philadelphia two years before after a checkered career as a corset maker and shopkeeper in England. While many colonists clung to the fairy tale of George III as a benign father figure in thrall to a wicked ministry, Paine bluntly demolished these illusions, dubbing the king “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”51 Within three months Paine’s astonishing work had sold 150,000 copies in a country of only three million people. Beyond its quotable prose, Common Sense benefited from perfect timing. It appeared just as Americans digested news of the Norfolk horror as well as George III’s October speech to Parliament in which he denounced the rebels as traitors and threatened to send foreign mercenaries to vanquish them. The historian Bernard Bailyn has noted that “one had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence,” but Paine’s work—“slapdash as it is, rambling as it is, crude as it is”—produced that magical effect.52
Common Sense was just the fillip needed by a demoralized Continental Army. In a letter to Washington, General Charles Lee pronounced the pamphlet “a masterly, irresistible performance” and said he had become a complete convert to independence. 53 From Virginia, Fielding Lewis, Washington’s brother-in-law, informed him that talk of independence was rapidly gaining ground and that “most of those who have read the pamphlet Common Sense say it’s unanswerable.”54 Although ignorant at first of the author’s identity, Washington instantly grasped the work’s significance. “A few more of such flaming arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk,” he told Joseph Reed, “added to the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contain[e]d (in the pamphlet) Common Sense, will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation.”55 Once his identity became known, Paine endeared himself to the troops by donating proceeds from his pamphlet to purchase woolen mittens for them. Within a year he was traveling as an aide-de-camp to Nathanael Greene and formed a close relationship with Washington. Even after the war Washington remained solicitous about Paine’s impoverished state, inquiring of James Madison, “Can nothing be done in our assembly for poor Paine? Must the merits and services of Common Sense continue to glide down the stream of time, unrewarded by this country?”56
WHILE GEORGE WASHINGTON TRIED GALLANTLY to hold his army together that winter, Martha was displaying her own brand of valor. Starting in June 1775, both Washingtons were borne on a powerful tide that would whirl them along for the rest of their lives. Unlike her husband, Martha wasn’t naturally courageous, but she was a determined woman who could will herself to rise to the occasion. To aid her husband, she conquered whatever fears or anxieties might have kept her from his side. For more than eight years of war, she would exhibit the fierce loyalty of a Spartan wife, a trial that she endured from a combination of wifely duty and outright patriotism.
Despite fears that Lord Dunmore might abduct her from Mount Vernon, Martha had refused to move to the small town house that the Washingtons owned in Alexandria. Washington dwelled on this possibility in so many letters that it got Martha’s attention, and she escaped to visit Jacky and Nelly in Maryland or stayed with her sister Anna Maria in New Kent County. Washington worried incessantly about her. “I could wish that my friends would endeavor to make the heavy and lonesome hours of my wife pass of[f] as smoothly as possible, for her situation gives me many a painful moment,” he confessed to brother Samuel that fall.57 Although he wrote weekly letters to Martha, many were opened en route by “scoundrel