The Trouble with Tom Read Online Free PDF Page A

rebellions."
    Very well. But eventually the present king and prime minister will both die or lose their party's confidence. The taxes for war debts against France will fade. A hopeful reader in 1776 might still believe that America's more or less peaceful relation to Britain would return. What is curious for an American to realize today is that this indeed might have happened , as it did in Canada. That an entire section of Common Sense is dedicated to arguing against making peace-"reconciliation now is a dangerous doctrine"-shows that peace was still thought a very real competing possibility in 1776. What made reconciliation a dangerous answer, to Paine, is that its proponents had asked all the wrong questions. In Common Sense , the burden of proof is not upon Americans to prove why they should be independent, but upon the British to prove why America should stay dependent. Britain only used America to its own purposes, Paine argued: why shouldn't Americans determine whether Britain served them any purpose? "Dependence on Great Britain tends to directly involve this continent in European wars and quarrels . . ." he concluded. "America goes to ruin, because of her connection with Britain."
    While a great many Americans were unhappy with King George, not many of them had really thought of being unhappy with all kings. Colonists wanted power over their own affairs, but were not overly picky about what form that power should take. Perhaps they would have their own king, or become a British protectorate; maybe they'd simply agitate until they got their own members of Parliament. But make that seemingly outrageous assertion "all kings are illegitimate" and this anchors your readers in a way that makes subsequent statements sound comparatively pragmatic: such as, say, how to raise up a navy against the most powerful country in the world. By the end of the pamphlet Paine has his green eyeshades on and his red pencil out to price various configurations of warships for Colonists-and suddenly the prospect of revolution is looking alarmingly practical, if not downright inevitable. Which, in retrospect, we probably imagine it was.
    We think of Common Sense as being the most withering attack ever upon that favorite bogeyman of Americans, mad old King George. Yet when you read it closely, you find this remarkable fact: not once is the name George III uttered. What Paine wrote was an attack on all kings, all illegitimate authority, on all the great and petty brutes of the world. Common Sense is a pair of rhetorical bolt cutters, and it will neatly snap in half anything-the cant of kings, priests, or next-door neighbors—that is placed between its blades. It is a declaration of independence, a new kind of argument that denies all precedence by smacking the rulebook out of an opponent's hands and ignoring every previous thing thought or said in their favor. Paine does not cite classical authors, or Tory opponents, or the constitutional theories of Bolingbroke; he is not playing at polite debate. He does not want your tradition: he wants your reason. The scepter of authority is no more exalted to him than the logician's rod of ivory, and when proof is lacking we may slap it aside. What Paine offered America was nothing less than rebirth, independence from the dead weight of the past: his epitaph directs you to an admonition from the dead to the living.
    "We have it in our power," he wrote, 'Yo begin the world again."
    And this is where it ends.
    Stand clear of the . . . Doors thud shut on the number 2 express and it roars out toward Brooklyn as I make my way through the turnstile and up into a canyon of buildings. Wall Street at night always feels strangely desolate, as any financial district is in its off hours, I suppose: nobody wants to stay here unless they have to. It's hard to imagine, looking up at the slumbering mass of law and investment firms, that people used to live around here. Carver's house was just a few blocks from here, as