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76 / Chapter 2 not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves.” Paine must have been thinking of Dickinson and other conservatives in his adopted colony of Pennsylvania when he wrote that “this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent, than all the other three.” Paine believed that if the reconciliators used common sense, they would understand that “it is repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things to all examples from former ages, to suppose, that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power.” Indeed, “small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”87 “I have heard some men say,” wrote Paine, “many of whom I believe spoke without thinking, that they dreaded an independence, fearing that it would produce civil wars.” But “it is but seldom that our first thoughts are truly correct, and that is the case here for there are ten times more to dread from a patched up connextion than from independence.” Paine believed that colonials were afraid to rebel both because “no plan is yet laid down” and because they did not recognize that American citizens possessed the “spirit of good order and obedience to continental government.”88 Believing that “a government of our own is our natural right,” Paine offered his own “hints” at how the new continental government could be established. He thought that assemblies of the people should be elected annually and that they should have a president rather than a king, for “in America THE LAW IS KING.” The president would be chosen by the delegates in the assembly by lot. Each state would send a minimum of thirty delegates to the assembly so that citizens would be adequately represented. State legislatures and citizens would directly elect delegates to a special convention, which, “being impowered by the people, will have a truly legal authority” to frame a “CONTINENTAL CHARTER.”89 Paine’s view of the perfect constitution was so alarmingly egalitarian that it earned him the lifelong enmity of John Adams, who wrote in an April 12, 1776, letter to wealthy Boston lawyer William Tudor that Paine’s view of government was “feeble indeed—it is poor and despicable,” and remembered in a June 22, 1819, letter to Thomas Jefferson that Common Sense was “a poor ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” In Paine’s ideal the American citizen was decidedly active and egalitarian, which may partly explain why his view of government caused Adams—who had about as much faith in the people as he had in King George III—so much crankiness.90 Paine demanded that his fellow Americans actively, bravely, Citizens as Romantic Heroes, 1764–1776 / 77 and boldly play the part of patriotic republican citizens by giving up the dream of reconciliation and recognizing the commonsense truth that the colonies had outgrown the monarchical fiction. The Romantic Republican Fiction: Citizens as Patriot Heroes John Adams wrote to James Warren on May 20, 1776, that “every post and every day rolls in upon us Independence like a torrent.” The sooner the better, too, for on June 7, 1776, a British fleet of 132 ships was reported to be sailing for New York, and while General George Washington readied his troops in the hope of withstanding the invasion, he knew that the relative inexperience of his men coupled with a dire lack of supplies made his situation one of “great distress.”91 Battles between colonials and British troops had been fought with encouraging success in Lexington and Concord and on Bunker Hill, and with much less success in Canada. And while some Continental Congress delegates still hoped for reconciliation and were therefore hesitant to declare independence from Great Britain, it was clear to most Americans that, independent or not, there was a war on. While one Virginian was in New York hoping to protect Americans, another Virginian, this time in Philadelphia, also hoped to defend Americans by his actions on that day. Richard Henry Lee moved that the Continental Congress consider three fateful motions. His first motion was also the most famous: “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown...

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