A Revolution Without Independence

Americans began their Revolution before they decided they wanted independence. By the summer of 1775, they had fought British troops from Lexington and Concord to Bunker Hill. George Washington commanded a new Continental Army outside Boston, and men had already died fighting the king’s forces. Yet Congress was still asking the king for help.

The Olive Branch Petition called George III the colonists’ “Most Gracious Sovereign” and asked him to restore peace and protect their rights.1 Americans were fighting his army while appealing to him as their protector.

Many colonists believed Parliament had violated their rights but still hoped the relationship with Britain could be repaired. Separation would be treason, bringing economic upheaval and war against one of the world’s strongest empires. When Common Sense appeared, reconciliation and independence were still competing possibilities. Americans had learned to resist British authority, but they had not yet decided to leave it.

For years, newspapers and sermons had carried arguments about taxation and representation, along with broader questions about natural rights and the limits of parliamentary power. Legislatures petitioned London while local committees organized resistance at home. Much of the debate, however, concerned the rights of colonists within the British Empire. It explained why Parliament was wrong without making the case that America should leave.

Building a movement required more than exposing British misconduct. The case for separation had to reach beyond legislative chambers and lawyers’ offices, and people had to understand it well enough to make it their own. By January 1776, the colonies needed an argument that could move Americans from resistance to independence.

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An Argument That Could Travel

Paine had arrived in Philadelphia little more than a year earlier and held no political office. Common Sense was not addressed to Congress, colonial legislators, or learned gentlemen. It was “addressed to the inhabitants of America.” The first edition appeared anonymously, credited only to “an Englishman.”2

By calling the pamphlet Common Sense, Paine suggested that readers were equipped to judge the question before them. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong,” he wrote, “gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Custom could not justify an institution simply because people had grown accustomed to it.

Paine reduced the imperial relationship to an image that required no lesson in constitutional theory: “There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”3 He also removed the king from the role many colonists still hoped he might play. George III was not standing apart from Parliament, waiting to restore colonial rights. He was part of the system they were resisting.

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Paine also made a practical case, arguing that independence would allow the colonies to seek foreign alliances and take responsibility for their own defense. Instead of asking how the imperial relationship might be repaired, he asked what America might gain by ending it.

He made the argument clear enough to survive outside the pamphlet and enter ordinary conversation. I used to say in politics that your ideas are only as good as your ability to get people to act on them. Paine understood the same thing. The case for independence could not remain an argument among political leaders. It had to become something Americans could carry into their own conversations as they decided what came next.

The Argument Goes Public

Common Sense appeared on 10 January 1776 and was advertised five days later. Its reach soon extended beyond the original pamphlet as newspapers reproduced parts of Paine’s argument and critics responded in print.4 James Chalmers published Plain Truth, a direct rebuttal to Paine’s call for separation. Its title page also addressed “the inhabitants of America.”5

George Washington saw evidence of a shift in private letters from Virginia, which he told Joseph Reed showed Common Sense was working “a powerful change” in the minds of many men.6 John Adams admired Paine’s ability while distrusting parts of his argument. He wrote that he could not match the pamphlet’s “Strength and Brevity,” its “elegant Simplicity,” or its “piercing Pathos.” But he dismissed its biblical case against monarchy and called its proposed continental government “feeble.” The ideas were not new, Adams believed, but Paine had expressed them with unusual force.7

The question was no longer confined to Congress. It had moved through newspapers and private letters into military camps and disputes between Patriots and Loyalists. Paine did not create the independence movement by himself. British policy and the war had steadily weakened hope for reconciliation, while months of political organizing pushed the colonies closer to separation. But Common Sense gave the movement words it could use. Americans could make the case without first explaining the entire history of the imperial crisis.

Independence had become a public argument. Paine’s achievement was not simply that he explained the case for independence, but that he made it usable. He gave Americans language they could carry into their own arguments and make their own.

The title page addressed Common Sense to “the inhabitants of America.” At first, those words described its audience. By the time readers finished the pamphlet, they described the people who would decide what came next.

The words above were published a week after Lexington and Concord, which should give us pause. We tend to remember Lexington as the beginning of an independence movement already gathering momentum. Yet the men who had just watched the Massachusetts militia confront British regulars still described themselves as loyal subjects of the Crown. They condemned what they called the “persecution and tyranny” of the ministry, but they had not yet abandoned the political world they inherited.

The distance between Lexington and Independence is one of the easiest realities of the Revolution to overlook. Looking backward, the path seems direct. Looking through the documents of 1775, it appears far less certain.

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Still Loyal, Already Preparing

The spring of 1775 was not calm. British troops occupied Boston, and few colonists still trusted royal officials. In Massachusetts, provincial leaders had already begun operating outside the normal channels of royal government, while preparing for the possibility that force might settle the conflict between colony and crown.

Yet preparation and loyalty existed side by side. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress repeatedly framed its cause in constitutional terms. Its members argued that British officials had violated long-established rights and exceeded their lawful authority. They spoke less as founders of something new than as defenders of liberties they believed already belonged to them.

To modern readers, that position can seem contradictory. To many colonists, it was not. They believed the problem was not the British constitutional tradition itself. The problem was that those entrusted to uphold it had begun to abandon it.

A Constitution Worth Saving

A resolve adopted on 24 March 1775 makes that understanding clear. The Provincial Congress urged towns and individual inhabitants to continue the measures already recommended for “putting this colony into a complete state of defence.” It also warned that any relaxation would bring “the utmost danger to the liberties of this colony and of all America.”

Those ideas belong together. Massachusetts prepared for a serious confrontation, but the Congress had not yet prepared for independence. It sought to defend what it regarded as constitutional liberty. The colonists wanted to preserve rights they believed they had inherited through law and feared Britain now threatened.

This is where modern readers can easily lose sight of the world the colonists inhabited. Leaders in Massachusetts did not usually describe those rights as American rights. More often, they described them as the rights of Englishmen. They cited charters, common law traditions, and constitutional principles that they believed bound both Parliament and the Crown. They did not argue that Britain lacked all authority over the colonies. They argued that authority had limits.

The political categories later generations would use had not yet hardened. The spring of 1775 did not pit committed Loyalists against committed advocates of independence. Many colonists opposed the course Britain had taken and prepared for armed resistance, while still hoping the constitutional relationship could be repaired. They feared what might happen next, but they had not yet agreed on what should happen afterward.

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The Night Before

By mid-April, that fragile balance had begun to narrow. Reports circulated that General Thomas Gage might move against military stores outside Boston, and the warning network built over months of crisis began to matter in practical ways.

Paul Revere later testified that on the evening of 18 April, Dr. Joseph Warren sent for him and told him that British troops were expected to march “by water to Cambridge, and from thence to Lexington.” His account keeps the night grounded in what people knew at the time: troops were moving, leading men might be in danger, and the countryside had to be warned.1

That is the April 18 worth remembering. The concern was immediate and practical. Would troops seize supplies? Would they arrest leaders? Would force now settle disputes that petitions and political arguments had failed to resolve? Those questions mattered without a settled vision of independence.

In retrospect, independence can seem like the obvious destination. It was anything but obvious in the spring of 1775. Colonial leaders still framed the dispute as a fight over constitutional obligations and inherited rights, even as some prepared for the possibility of armed resistance.

The Declaration speaks with the confidence of a people who have reached a conclusion. The documents from the months before Lexington read like the work of people still wrestling with a question.

Farther From Independence Than We Remember

The Declaration of Independence now dominates our memory of the Revolution, but it remained distant in the spring of 1775. Not merely distant on the calendar, but distant in political imagination. Even after Lexington and Concord, many Americans continued to hope that Britain and the colonies could repair their constitutional relationship.

The Continental Congress offers another reminder of how much political ground remained. Congress had not yet treated independence as the inevitable result of the fighting in Massachusetts. To reach the Declaration, colonists first had to conclude not merely that British officials had acted improperly, but that the imperial relationship itself could no longer secure the liberties they sought to protect.

That conclusion came gradually as the war widened and reconciliation failed. In the spring of 1775, many Americans still stood between resistance and independence. The opening image makes that clear: even after Lexington and Concord, and even after blood had been shed, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress still described the colonists as loyal subjects of the Crown.

What Changed After Lexington

Lexington did not instantly create a movement for independence. It changed confidence that the existing relationship could be restored. Before the fighting, many colonists believed they could preserve constitutional liberties within the British system. After the fighting, that belief became harder to sustain.

The men who described themselves as “loyal and dutiful subjects” were not confused about who they were. They believed they defended a constitutional inheritance that stretched across the Atlantic and back through generations of English history. When they prepared for resistance, they hoped to preserve those liberties, not discard them.

The fighting at Lexington did not answer that question. It made the question harder to avoid. The Revolution did not begin with a settled vision of a new nation. It began with colonists trying to save a political world they believed was worth preserving, until events forced them to confront that it might no longer be repaired.

Sources

• Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 24 March 1775 Resolve.

• Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 26 April 1775 Address.

• Paul Revere Deposition, 1775.

• Journals of the Continental Congress, 1775–1776.

• Peter Force, American Archives, Fourth Series.

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