He needed to persuade them by showing in powerful and vivid language that Britain was a power-hungry imperial force under whose boot Americans were always going to suffer – unless, that is, they decided enough was enough. So Paine needed to do more than simply lay out the situation to such people. But Thomas Paine sensed that the appetite for a fight was there, if only someone could stir the populace to action and he knew the right way to get the ordinary man and woman on side. Put simply, many people didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go to war against such a powerful imperial nation as Britain. Nevertheless, in 1775 many Americans living within the Thirteen Colonies still favoured reconciliation with their British overlords. What was it about Paine’s pamphlet that caused such a stir? It was partly good timing: anti-British feeling had been growing in the last few years, especially since Britain introduced a range of taxes in 1763 to help fund their wars in Europe and India such a tax famously led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and the British retaliation that swiftly followed. George Washington wrote to a friend in Massachusetts, ‘I find that Common Sense is working a powerful change there in the minds of many men’. Paine was soon editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, and in late 1775 began writing Common Sense, which would rapidly cause a sensation throughout the Thirteen Colonies.
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