Paine’s writing is equally as revealing for what he does and doesn’t say about class. He would not tackle the monopoly of land and wealth until 1797, after watching the French Revolution unfold, when he declared in Agrarian Justice that everyone had an equal and divine right to the ownership of the earth. In Common Sense, he pushed class, poverty, and other social divisions aside. Though he acknowledged the “distinctions of rich, of poor,” he directly dismissed the “harsh ill-sounding names” that exacerbated class conflict. In two breezy paragraphs, he coupled the distinctions of class and sexual difference as phenomena beyond present political concern. They were differences derived from nature, effects that had come about by accident. They simply were. Class disparities did not rise to the level of justifying revolution.36
Paine’s sleight of hand in concealing class reflected his preference for talking about breeds. His overarching argument was that European-descended Americans were a new race in the making, one specially bred for free trade instead of the state machinery of imperial conquest. His critique of the British political economy was centered on the enormous debts it incurred through expensive military adventures, which he blamed on the frivolous ambitions of English royalty. Over time, kings and queens had become wasteful heads of state, in and of themselves a social liability.37
He accused the monarchy of “engrossing the commons,” that is, destroying the representative nature of the House of Commons, the one branch that embodied the will of the rising merchant class in England. The American colonies, meanwhile, were being “drained” of their collective manpower and wealth, merely to underwrite new overseas wars. Independence would allow America to “begin the world over again,” Paine declared dramatically. The new nation would signal a new world order. Unburdened by constant debt and a large military, it would be a vibrant continental power erected on the ideals of free trade and global commerce.38
As a promoter on the order of the Hakluyts, Paine conceived of America as an experimental society through which to adjust, or recalibrate, the very meaning of empire. Like past commentators, he extolled the natural resources of America: timber, tar, iron, and hemp. Corn and other agricultural goods would give America a leading role in feeding Europe. North America’s major cash crop, tobacco, was starkly missing from his discussion—he used grain-producing Pennsylvania as his model, not Virginia.39
Most important, he insisted that independence would benefit both America and the British nation. Free trade (as he imagined it) did not discriminate; it knew no bounds. He even assured his American readers that English merchants would be on their side, wanting to protect and advance trade with America rather than plunge the government of Great Britain into another costly war. He was right about some merchants, but dead wrong about the war.40
It was Paine’s theory of human nature that led him to emphasize commercial alliances over class divisions. His mantra was: commerce was natural, monarchy was unnatural. In many of his writings, he argued that commerce emerged from mutual affections and shared survival impulses, while monarchy rested on plunder and overawing the “vulgar” masses. Ultimately, kings benefited no one but themselves. “Your dependence upon the crown is no advantage,” he told his readers in another essay, “but rather an injury to the people of Britain, as it increases the power and influence of the King. They benefited only by trade, and this they have after you are independent of the crown.” In this way, Paine saw commerce as the balm that smoothed over class differences and united the interests of British and American merchants alike.41
Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, “the mind of the multitude is left at random,” he wrote, and “the property of no man is secure.” Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling. Landless mobs were waiting in the wings if colonial leaders failed to act. For Paine, “common sense” meant preserving the basic structure of the class order, and preventing the whole from descending into a mob mentality and eventual anarchy.42
An effective system of commerce needed a stable class system, but what it didn’t need was dull-witted kings running the show. The practice of “exalting one man so greatly above the rest” was contrary to common sense and nature. Not only were the “ignorant and unfit” routinely elevated to kings, so were ennobled infants, as yet lacking reason. A “king worn out by age and infirmity” could not be legitimately removed from power. Here was nature out of control, deformed, perverted. Paine mocked the idea that English royalty were “some new species,” a “race of men” worthy of infallible stature. History did not justify any claim that the “present race of kings” had honorable (let alone divine) origins. William the Conqueror was a “French Bastard,” an invader with his “armed Banditti,” a “usurper,” a “ruffian,” Paine scoffed.43
In the course of desacralizing the British monarchy as an effete if not defunct breed, Paine repeated what other enlightened critics had already said. Recall that Paine had only been in America for thirteen months in January 1776, when the first edition of Common Sense was published, and he had not yet traveled outside of Philadelphia. His knowledge of America was based mostly on newspapers and books, the squibs and scraps he collected from the storehouse of public knowledge in circulation in England and America. Paine asked Franklin (who was still in England as war approached) for a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Goldsmith, Franklin, and Paine all embraced the popular science of natural history, which divided the continents into distinct breeds or races of people.44
On this basis, Paine pursued two powerful arguments about breeding. One highlighted the notion that Britain’s monarchy was rooted in antiquated thinking and political superstition. The other aimed to prove that Americans were a distinct people, a lineage based not on superstition but on science. The widely regarded theories of Linnaeus (1707–78) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), which influenced Goldsmith’s treatise, divided the world into varieties and races shaped by the environment unique to each major continent. The Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, better known to history as Linnaeus, organized all of plant and animal life, and divided Homo sapiens, the word he coined for humans, into four varieties. The European type he said was sanguine, brawny, acute, and inventive; the American Indian he deemed choleric and obstinate, yet free; the Asian was melancholic and greedy; and the African was crafty, indolent, and negligent. This grand (and ethnocentric) taxonomy served Paine’s purpose in justifying the American Revolution. To “begin the world over again,” Americans of English and European descent had to be a new race in the making—perhaps a better one—as they laid claim to North America.45