Okay, so here’s the thing about Common Sense:

It’s not as though Thomas Paine came up with prose so extraordinarily clear that everyone suddenly smacked their foreheads and said, “My God! Independence! Of COURSE!”

In fact, many people thought Common Sense was crazy, and others considered it an incitement to the all-out war that everyone was trying to avoid. There were complaints that what Paine had written was dangerous, even violent.

But the pamphlet was heavily advertised, and Paine was involved in a very ugly, very public feud with his publisher Robert Bell. Those two things, combined with the accusations of scandalousness, meant that sales were going through the roof. And people weren’t just buying it, they were reading it.

And as time went on, the argument made by Paine became more and more palatable. And by the time July came around, Paine’s ideas largely stood up to reason.

P.S. One time years ago, when I lived in New York, I came home from work in a powerful rainstorm. When I entered the house, rather than track my wet feet throughout the house, I opened up my newspaper and dropped it on the floor, and I stepped lightly a few times on it. When my wife asked what I was doing, I told her, “These are the Times that dry men’s soles.”
I’ll let myself out, now.

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