We often make New Year’s resolutions to help us reach our personal goals for the coming year, but our nation’s founders set their sights on a bigger proposition at the beginning of January in 1776.
The Continental Congress passed the Tory Act on Jan. 2. The act was composed of several resolutions aimed at those Colonial Loyalists who maintained allegiance to King George III. Eight days later, Thomas Paine published “Common Sense,” arguably the most popular and successful pamphlet in history.
The Tory Act resolutions addressed the wide scope of the Patriots’ attitudes toward the Loyalists and included both carrots and sticks to bring them into line on the side of American independence.
Some Loyalists were called “honest and well-meaning, but uninformed people” who have been “deceived” about the American cause of liberty. It was resolved that they should be treated “with kindness and attention … to view their errors as proceeding rather from want of information than want of virtue or public spirit.”
But a sharper-edged resolution that targeted those Loyalists who hoped to be rewarded by aiding the British “oppressors” was also included in the act. They were put on notice that Congress would retaliate if necessary.
In “Common Sense,” Paine wrote about the big ideas that would be in the Declaration of Independence six months later, but in a common style aimed at regular people. It was estimated that 20% of the Colonial population had a copy of the pamphlet within a year of its release. It was brief enough that it could be read to those Colonialists who could not read.
Paine rejected monarchy and the tyrannical result of great power residing in one person and one ruling class. He argued that in a democratic republic, “the law is king.”
“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected.”
In a December New York Times article titled “The Pamphlet That Has Roused Americans to Action for 250 Years,” Boston University Professor Joseph Rezek argues that Paine’s words are as powerful as ever.
“Especially as the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of independence, it is crucial to ask not whether ‘Common Sense’ is perfect, but rather what kind of wisdom it might offer at a moment as complicated as the one Paine himself inhabited.”
As Rezek pointed out, the change from a king to the nation of laws that Paine supported is “affirmed every time a federal official swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, rather than to kneel to a king.”
As we begin again in 2026, some Americans support a president who rules more like a monarch without regard to the laws to which we all are bound. There is little practical difference between that and a monarchy.
But the great American experiment is a work in progress, and there will be many times during the coming year for average citizens to continue to shape the nation, including the public forums surrounding the nation’s birthday celebration and the 2026 mid-term Congressional elections in November.
As Thomas Paine said in “Common Sense,” “We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
