BY THE ROOD BRIDGE

Thoughts on the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution

Apr 18, 2025

By the rood bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

That quatrain opens the Concord Hymn, a poem written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 to mark the unveiling of a monument on the site of the Battle of Concord, one of the first battles of the American Revolution. April 19th is the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord just outside Boston MA and America is in a crisis of governance that threatens to overturn the nation and society that grew from those first skirmishes.

North Bridge Concord MA Battle Monument the “votive stone” of Emerson’s Concord Hymn

Emerson’s poem continues:

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

If you are an American my age you read that poem, or heard the opening, at some point in your education in the 1960s. It had a different effect then, with America shimmering still in the glow of victory in World War 2, as did so many of the founding fathers’ calls to liberty and the fight necessary to attain it and then guard it. Now America is in its deepest crisis since the Civil War and the Founders’ words need to be re-examined, none more so than those of Thomas Paine.

Tom Paine, was the pamphleteer — the propagandist — of the American Revolution. Paine was an Englishman who wanted to put Enlightenment ideas on political liberty into practical effect and saw in the case of the American colonies a place where a just society of equal citizens, not subjects of a monarch could be created.

He was befriended by Benjamin Franklin during one of Franklin’s visits to London in the mid 1770s to lobby the great and the good for the idea of independence for the American colonies. Franklin invited him to come to Philadelphia and lend his literary voice to the coming struggle for independence.

Paine arrived in late 1774. A few months after his arrival, the Battles of Lexington and Concord were fought and he began writing a pamphlet which, in those pre-digital — pre-analog days would not appear until January 1776. It was published anonymously under the title of Common Sense. Paine would adopt the phrase as a pseudonym.

His prose seems florid now but at the time it was thought to be plain-speaking, understandable to ordinary folk. Re-reading these words as today’s American crisis unfolds it is not difficult to see the connections from the past to our present. A significant number, nearly half the country despair of the Trump regime — many (something a serious polling operation might try and measure) would like to see Trump and his enablers thrown out of office and fear that the mid-term elections will be too late. But they lack a precedent to cite in demanding his removal.

That was the case in 1775 when the Revolution began. There was no precedent for the colonists to stand against the King, to remove his authority over them. To do so seemed unthinkable, just as overthrowing a freely elected President seems unthinkable — primarily because it has never been done. Paine addresses this in the pamphlet’s opening paragraph noting:

… A formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

After further throat clearing he summons the world to the Colonies’ cause.

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, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested.

250 years since the Revolution began, 230+ since a Constitution for the United States of America was signed, we are the inheritors of this idea. Imperfect at its founding and clearly, deeply flawed still, nevertheless our “cause remains the cause of all mankind.”

I have lived more than half my life abroad and the shock of the current regime’s policies on people in Europe and the countries of the Middle East from where I have reported is impossible to overstate. A sense that the proselytizor, protector and guarantor of liberty for all people has forsaken its role and its friends has left people numb and fearful.

Back to Common Sense. Having summoned the world’s attention Tom Paine gets to the core of what government is for.

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness …
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

It is hard not to think of Mar a Lago as a palace built on the bowers of paradise — (Well maybe the swampy barrier island on which Palm Beach was built is not everyone’s idea of paradise but with air conditioning’s invention it’s a tolerable place … and you take Paine’s meaning.)

Now he gets to the heart of the matter:

Security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

The idea of security being “the true design and end of government” lay behind the Revolution and is what lies at the heart of the present American crisis. Don’t know about you, but the unelected richest man in the world sending his minions to take control of all our personal records housed in Washington, ostensibly with the support of the President, doesn’t make me feel secure at all, nor does snatching legal residents off the street and shipping them to a gulag in El Salvador.

Nor does it make me feel like an independent citizen, I begin to feel like I’m being shuffled towards being a subject of an unaccountable ruler, which was the status of the colonists in 1775. And I am not alone in reaching the conclusion that like the colonists it is time to fight and reclaim my rights of independent citizenship

And so the crisis mirrors that of 1775/76 because action must come now, as Paine writes:

First, Because it will come to that one time or other. Secondly, Because the longer it is delayed, the harder it will be to accomplish.

Then in words that seem to describe what has been happening in the US since Inauguration Day he explains why reconciliation with the current power over the colonies — the King and his local supporters — is not possible:

The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflection. Without law, without government, without any other mode of power than what is founded on, and granted by, courtesy … Our present condition is, Legislation without law; wisdom without a plan; a constitution without a name; and, what is strangely astonishing, perfect independence contending for dependence.

The echoes continue as Paine acknowledges that there is not unanimity among the colonists for breaking free of King George III. Independence in 1775 was a minority political belief. There was no polling of public opinion in 1775 but historians estimate up to 40% of the two and half million people living in the thirteen colonies supported independence, maybe 20% were loyal to the Crown and the rest just wanted to get on with their lives. Still the 40% when united were able to prosecute the revolution to a successful conclusion.

After the fraught first 90 days of his second administration, Trump’s popularity among his partisans remains only slightly diminished. Around 44% approve of his performance. That is a large enough minority to block change if those of us opposed to him act without unanimity. What is the goal of the Trump opposition? That is something for future newsletters.

To return to Common Sense, Paine points that powerful men have the means to keep the society:

The king and his worthless adherents are got at their old game of dividing the Continent, and there are not wanting among us Printers who will be busy in spreading specious falsehoods. The artful and hypocritical letter which appeared a few months ago in two of the New-York papers, and likewise in two others, is an evidence that there are men who want both judgment and honesty.

He doesn’t mention whether any of these irresponsible and dishonest men are named Rupert Murdoch.

By now you understand that Paine is never short of a word or two or two hundred of them. The conclusion to his pamphlet is not succinct but this is the core:

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men … are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months.

An updated version would read:

We have it in our power to begin America over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Franklin until now. The birthday of a new America is at hand in which each is to receive their “restored” portion of freedom and it is the work of a few months.

Well, maybe more than a few months. America was hopelessly divided long before Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his first run for president and repairing that rift, if it is reparable, will be the work of years not months.

By the end of 1776 Paine would begin his next pamphlet, titled the American Crisis:

These are the times that try men’s souls The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.