9 February is a day to reflect upon the authors of freedom and their critics. In 1776, “Common Sense” was published anonymously. Preferring radicalism over reform, it was the tract for its time:
The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.
John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:
It has been very generally propagated through the Continent that I wrote this Pamphlet. But altho I could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style, I flatter myself I should have made a more respectable Figure as an Architect, if I had undertaken such a Work.
Adams later observed that the work’s ideal was “so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” By the end of Adams’s life, he was complaining to another former foe that the work was “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mess.”
The work’s author, Thomas Paine, was born on 9 February 1737, 88 years to the day that the critic’s son, John Quincy Adams, received the nod of the US House of Representative after that radical reform called the Electoral College failed to provide a clear winner for president.
