Common Sense
After the battle of Lexington and Concord, a British man by the name of Thomas Paine became very sympathetic to the Patriot cause. He created a pamphlet known as Common Sense. In it, he argued that the colonists only have one option left as things had gotten so bad with England, and that was to declare independence. In his 46 page pamphlet, Thomas Paine argued that it made political, economic, and social sense for the colonies to create their own country. He believed in the ideas raised by the Enlightenment; that all men were born with unalienable rights, rights that cannot be taken away from them. In its first year of publication, the pamphlet sold more than 100,000 copies in the colonies and became the best-selling book that year, even surpassing the Bible. Colonists were becoming more and more convinced that declaring independence was the best step to take to ensure that could keep their rights and freedoms.
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