But I actually want to begin with something that I just - in my head when I think about Thomas Paine I think about this, so I feel like I can’t start this lecture without discussing it. And then we’re also going to look some at its author, Thomas Paine, who he was and how he came to produce this influential pamphlet. So what we’re going to be looking at is the pamphlet itself and what specifically made it so remarkable. And certainly many scholars consider it to be the most brilliant political pamphlet of the Revolution, not necessarily for the subtlety of its argument but certainly for the way in which it’s argued, and I’ll talk more about that in the course of the lecture. You’ll really get a sense of what kind of a bestseller this was. It actually sold over 120,000 copies in its first few months in print, and a little bit later in the lecture I’m going to give you a sense of how that compares with how some other things might have sold in this time period. On to Common Sense, which really, truly unquestionably was a bestseller. So that is the answer to the question: How do you vote on voting? I had not thought about it before and yet historians have addressed it so there you go so - Okay. But the answer to the question - how did they vote? - is apparently someone made a motion - ‘I make a motion that we just do the one colony, one vote thing’ - and people just voted on the motion as a group.
Of course, it then becomes a precedent for Congress under the Articles of Confederation. So when they wrote it down in the minutes, they said, we’re deciding one colony, one vote, but not with the idea that it will be a precedent for all time. They were all worried that they’d be setting a precedent for all time. And with - after apparently arguing for quite some time, what they realized was they actually really didn’t have an orderly way to figure out population and property worth, and so they ultimately just decided one colony, one vote, - like, that’s all we can do.Īnd they were really concerned because they didn’t want that to be a precedent. So the answer to the question is: they actually had a pretty animated debate in the Continental Congress on the whole voting question, and some people said it should be according to population and some said, ‘Well, you should put property in with population,’ and some people said one colony, one vote. Professor Joanne Freeman: Today we are going to be discussing certainly one of the biggest bestsellers in early American history, and that’s Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense. Before I plunge in to Common Sense, I am going to answer the question that was asked from this section of the room on Tuesday, about how do you vote on voting - the little brain teaser of the Continental Congress.Īnd I found the answer to this question.
The American Revolution HIST 116 - Lecture 10 - Common SenseĬhapter 1.
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