This month marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an anniversary well worth celebrating. It is not, however, the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution. That began on April 19, 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord Bridge. It took over a year of fighting to convince colonists to accept that the time for compromise, for reconciliation, for any kind of reversion to the previous state of existence — for half-measures — was gone and the only path forward was independence.
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That’s where Thomas Paine and Common Sense played a role. Since his arrival in Philadelphia in 1774, Paine had watched American politicians try to reason with England, hoping to reshape the relationship with George III and with Parliament, rather than to sever it. It did not work. “Why is it that we hesitate?,” Paine asked his readers. “From Britain we can expect nothing but ruin.”
Paine wrote Common Sense at the end of 1775 — between when the Revolution began and when the colonists declared independence — and he wrote specifically to convince the colonists to break their ties with England. “Nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously,” he told his readers, “as an open and determined declaration for independence.”
In the winter of 1775-1776, a growing number of colonists were ready to meet the British Army on the battlefield. The colonists and the British government had been at odds with each other for a decade, fighting over taxes and over jurisdiction. The government in London, though, seemed only to be pushing things further to the brink, especially when they began stationing soldiers in Boston.
Still, and much to Paine’s chagrin, through the rest of 1775 most colonists thought that declaring independence was a step too far. Three months after the fighting began, when the Continental Congress set out to explain the “causes and necessity of taking up arms,” they tried to assure “our friends and fellow-subjects” in the British Empire that “we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored … We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing independent states.”
Five months later, when Paine wrote Common Sense, he still worried that “the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor.” And so, Paine made a case not just outlining England’s crimes, but also explaining why they had rendered any sort of half-measure or compromise impossible.
We tend to associate the lead-up to the American Revolution with the colonists’ complaints about British taxes and duties, which certainly led to disputes about jurisdiction and the relative authority of the crown and the colonial governments. We also remember the catch-phrase of the era, “no taxation without representation.
Those debates and those issues, though, were not part of Common Sense. Paine focused on what, for him, was Britain’s unforgivable crime: setting the British Army against the colony’s own citizens. “The independancy of America,” Paine wrote, “should have been considered, as dating its æra from, and published by, the first musket that was fired against her.”
This was a point that Paine returned to again and again.
“No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself before the fatal nineteenth of April 1775.” But once he learned that British troops had attacked the people of Lexington and Concord, he knew that “a new era for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen. All plans, proposals, & c. prior to the nineteenth of April … are like the almanacks of the last year; which, though proper then, are … useless now.” As for King George II, “I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever; and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of father of his people can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.”
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Paine’s message was clear: setting troops against the people demanded resistance. And this message was the key to getting the colonies to unite and declare independence. The disputes about taxes and jurisdiction went back to 1765. The colonists’ leaders had fought British policies on every issue, without ever wanting to stop being a part of the British Empire. But now that the British had sent their own army against the colony’s British citizens, Paine’s calls for independence found an eager audience among American readers.
When Paine wrote of moderates calling for reconciliation with England, he urged them to think closely about the violence which the British Army had inflicted on the colonists, and if that level of violence had made reconciling impossible. “Tell me,” he wrote, “whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land?”
In January 1776, his answer was no. In July 1776, that became the Continental Congress’s answer, as well — colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia were united enough in their horror at the British army’s violence that they declared their independence not as 13 colonies, but as 13 united states.
This concern about state-sanctioned violence resonates again today. Paine’s reference to British soldiers as “Highwaymen and Housebreakers” brings up images of agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement barging into homes without warrants and dragging out their terrified inhabitants.
In 2026, there is no foreign power from which we can declare independence, but as state violence persists, so too does the legacy of resistance by colonists who heeded Paine’s call to reject Britain’s “long and violent abuse of power.”
The “Road to 250” series is an initiative of Historians for 2026, a group of early American academics, public historians, archivists, and educators devoted to shaping an accurate, inclusive, and just public memory of the American Founding for the 250th anniversary.
Noah Shusterman is associate professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author most recently of Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.