Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams' Selling of the Revolution

Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams' Selling of the Revolution

Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams each contributed to "selling the

revolution" to a complacent society through their pamphlets, and writing

such as Common Sense, and The American Crisis, The Rights of Man, and The

Age of Reason, all of which concentrated on the emotions of the society

during the Revolutionary Era.

Englishman Thomas Paine is said to be the most persuasive writer of

the revolution. After 37 years of drifting from various jobs such as

corset maker to a school teacher he decided to come to the United States

to make a new start. He moved to Philadelphia where he worked as a

journalist. The controversy between England and the colonies prompted him

to write to write Common Sense. Through this pamphlet he caused the

people to support breaking away from the British because of the way he

denounced King George the 3rd (1689-1702) as a "royal brute", a murderer

and a thief, and stated that we should not be a continent that is

attached to an island.

In 1776 while Paine was on the road with the continental army he

wrote a series of pamphlets called the American Crisis where he persuaded

people not to give up their fight. As best stated in the American Crisis,

...God Almighty will not give up

a people to military destruction, or leave them

unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and

so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war,

by every decent method which wisdom could

invent.

Here Paine is persuading the people to continue the fight because

it is willed by the power of God and that man in himself should fight for

what is right. He convinces the fearful society of what they should do. By

these writing being circulated, more and more people became supportive of