Paine V. Chalmers Maintaining Historical Perspective Is Essay

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Paine v. Chalmers

Maintaining historical perspective is a difficult task nearly two-hundred and fifty years after the event but a reading of Thomas Paine's Common Sense (Paine, 1997) and the contradictory pamphlet, Plaint Truth (Chalmers, 2010), prepared by British loyalist, James Chalmers, offers readers an excellent glance at the situation in colonial America in the beginning days of the Revolution. As evidenced by the rhetoric in both volumes, lines were being sharply drawn which would seem to indicate that there were only two sides to the issue but, in reality, the Chalmers and Paine writings are only examples of the two extremes and most of the colonists were philosophically positioned somewhere in between the two extremes.

The significance of Paine's pamphlet cannot be overstated. Relations between the Mother Country, England, and her colonies had been growing strained for a number of years but the impassioned words of a young dissident, who was relatively unknown at the date of his publishing Common Sense, would serve to galvanize the colonists and motivate them to participate in open rebellion.

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Paine put into words the idea that Britain no longer had the right to govern the colonies (Paine: p. 25); that the monarchy was essentially corrupt both in operation and concept (Paine: p. 16); and, that the colonies were capable of sustaining themselves (Paine: p. 27). These were attitudes and beliefs that had been developing in the colonies for some time and particularly since the end of the French and Indian War but it was left to Paine to put them into words and circulate those words.

Breaking away from the monarchy, however, was not a universally held belief. There remained a significant segment of colonial society that held a contrary view. The publication of Paine's pamphlet was met with a certain measure of surprise and those who remained loyal to the crown were not content to sit back and allow Paine's views to go unchallenged. One individual determined to profess the opposing view was a prominent gentleman farmer from Maryland named James Chalmers. Within a few months of Paine's publishing of.....

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