Antiques.(The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America)

 
We have it in our power to begin the world over again ... the birthday 
of a new world is at hand. 
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 

On January 10, 1776, one of the most remarkable political pamphlets in the history of English writing appeared in Philadelphia. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a forceful and brilliant argument for the independence of the American colonies from Great Britain and the superiority of republican government over hereditary monarchy, had an enormous impact on the subsequent decision for independence. By the end of 1776, no fewer than twenty-five editions had been printed, and Paine later estimated to a friend that it probably sold well over 150,000 copies in America that year, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers. John Adams claimed that "without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." "I know not," Adams added, "whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Thomas Paine."

The general effect of the American Revolution throughout the Atlantic world was a sense that a new era was beginning--one that embodied the ideas of liberty and equality and legitimized the criticism of existing powers. The "rising glory of America" seemed ripe for celebration in the epic strain, and the likes of Philip Freneau began an outburst of literary nationalism that was echoed and reechoed by every major American writer for nearly half a century. The United States, Freneau wrote, was "Paradise anew," which "Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost, / No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow, / No tempting serpent to allure the soul / From native innocence. A Canaan here, / Another Canaan shall excel the old."

Unlike the Roman myth of classical culture (given its final magnificent and persuasive form in Virgil's Aeneid) that envisioned life within a long dense corridor of meaningful history, the American vision saw life and history as just beginning. It suggested, as the critic R. W. B. Lewis once wrote, "an image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure": ...