Once upon a time, American British colonists were separated from power, decision-making, culture and information by thousands of miles and many weeks. As Helena Yoo-Roth puts it, time “flowed evenly outward” from the homeland.
This is the story of waiting, longing and realizing that time just might be on our side as we approached the American Revolutionary War. Helena Yoo-Roth is the author of the forthcoming American Timelines: Imperial Communications, Colonial Time-Consciousness, and the Coming of the American Revolution.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:00] It's October 25th, 1760, and King George the Second has died.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:00:08] Honestly, there should be no [00:00:10] news that is more important than the death of the king in the administering of a nation and empire.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:17] This is Helena Yoo-Roth.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:00:19] I [00:00:20] am Helena Yoo-Roth. I am the Barbara postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. [00:00:30] I got my PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and I study the coming of the American Revolution.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:39] So [00:00:40] the king dying is a big deal because he's in charge of everything, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:44] Not quite.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:00:45] Not because the king is making his decisions on everything, but because it's [00:00:50] this view of the body politic with the king at its head, so that, you know, judges and assemblies and your local jailer and everyone, Every [00:01:00] tax collector is working off of the power of the king.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:04] All right. So it's more like this is important because without the king, nobody has any power.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:09] Bingo.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:01:09] There [00:01:10] was a administrative law passed in Great Britain that said, okay, after the death of the king, we will have a [00:01:20] six month extension of government. Meaning the dead King's judges, the dead king's jailers, the dead King's tax men can all continue to operate for six months. Cool. [00:01:30] Cool. And that is plenty of time for the nation. But when you start taking those six months and spending three of them [00:01:40] to travel, then that looks like potentially there might be a problem.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:44] Oh.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:45] So you see where this is going?
Nick Capodice: [00:01:47] Well, my best guess is this is going to the 13 colonies. [00:01:50] Although three months seems like a long time.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:54] Typically 6 to 8 weeks minimum. So three months is not out of the [00:02:00] question. But back to the King. He's dead.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:02:04] New Yorkers raised the question of at what point should the six month extension of government [00:02:10] begin? Is it when the king died in Kensington Palace, or is it when the New Yorkers got the official news? Is it in October or is it [00:02:20] in January? When did the king die?
Nick Capodice: [00:02:25] When did the king die?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:27] Okay, this maybe sounds ridiculous, but for [00:02:30] the colonists, the king dies when they hear that the king died.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:02:37] And this is something that they try to legislate. And [00:02:40] the New Yorkers say the king dies when we receive notice. We can't possibly be expected to act on terms where we don't know. And so the six month extension of [00:02:50] government should be from when we hear about the king's death. Similar pieces of legislation are passed in new Jersey, South Carolina [00:03:00] and Bermuda. And in new Jersey, South Carolina and Bermuda. Those acts are passed and the governor sign off. And then later on [00:03:10] in London they get shot down by the Empire. But in New York, there's a very curmudgeonly old governor named Cadwallader Colden, who is trying to curry [00:03:20] favor with his imperial overlords. And he's determined that this is not going to pass. And so the New Yorkers tried three times to pass this piece of legislation, [00:03:30] and he keeps vetoing it. And you see them really wrestling with the question of when does something happen? What does time mean? And the New Yorkers [00:03:40] are like, I know it looks insane, but it's actually very, very sane if you see it over here.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:45] This is civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:47] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:48] And today we are learning [00:03:50] the story of colonial revolt from a new perspective. What happens when you make people wait.
PRE ROLL
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:04:18] Although [00:04:10] colonists [00:04:20] at the peripheries and imperial officials at the center both had to wait for news to travel across the Atlantic, not all kinds of waiting were created equal. Furthermore, [00:04:30] the passage of time did not always equate to waiting. Orders flowed from one direction, from the Metropole to the peripheries. Imperial officials in Whitehall didn't wait [00:04:40] for colonists. Instead, delays in communication were simply the consequence of time that flowed evenly outwards.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:47] Greenwich Mean Time, aka London time, [00:04:50] was not yet a thing, but we're going to be talking about what it meant when the colonies were on the London clock despite being many weeks away. [00:05:00] And this is something that Helena is thinking a lot about.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:05:05] I am working on a book project titled American Timelines, Imperial [00:05:10] Communications, Colonial Time Consciousness and the coming of the American Revolution.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:15] Colonial time consciousness.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:17] We will get there, but we're going to start [00:05:20] slow. Really slow. Because when something big happens in Europe, when it hits the newsstands in London, for example, you know, read all about [00:05:30] it. War of Spanish succession over.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:32] What's that?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:34] Typical American, always the last to hear. Anyway, you're gonna know that pretty dang fast in England. [00:05:40] But for the 13 American colonies, first that news has to get on a boat. And [00:05:50] that boat has to cross the ocean.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:05:53] At a minimum, it takes six weeks. Honestly, it takes much longer than that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:58] And as that news becomes an [00:06:00] old story in London. It is just reaching the ports of Boston or New [00:06:10] York. But all of this time has passed. And you, the colonial news consumer, you know, [00:06:20] this is old news. It's only new to you. It's an echo of the past.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:06:33] What [00:06:30] happens when you stretch the thin skin of a nation across a 3000 miles of ocean to [00:06:40] a maritime empire? What happens then? Because all of a sudden, when you are bringing the London newspapers, maybe [00:06:50] six weeks of newspapers all at once, and then you're dropping them in the colonies, and people at the ports are processing them. It's sort of like binge watching Empire and [00:07:00] then having this long gap in which they have their own theories, their own concerns.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:06] Like getting really into a TV show and thinking you're going to be able to watch the next season [00:07:10] right away, but then you find out you gotta wait a year to see what happens next.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:07:14] Colonists are living in these multiple timelines where they're having to pay attention to what's happening [00:07:20] in London, and they're also trying to figure out how to best work the system at home, and increasingly becoming aware [00:07:30] that in the six weeks that it took for news potentially to get to you, six weeks of events have already occurred that you don't know about. And how do you deal with that? [00:07:40]
Nick Capodice: [00:07:40] How do you deal with that?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:41] Well, I mean, eventually you really don't.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:07:47] I study the way [00:07:50] the development of something I call colonial time consciousness catalyze the coming of the American Revolution.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:56] So Helena is saying that this time consciousness thing. This [00:08:00] contributed to the revolution, the delay in the binge.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:03] It's about more than the delay and the binge. It's about who controls information, who controls [00:08:10] the timeline, and who has to wait.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:08:13] Well, you know, everyone has to wait, right? You know, communications is what it is. Everyone's waiting for communications, and [00:08:20] I just want to intervene in that and just say making people wait is an expression of power and the specifics of who waits on whom and for what, [00:08:30] under what terms and conditions they super matter. And so at one extreme, the experience of waiting forces individuals into sort of a non-place of immobility, where their agency [00:08:40] and control are stripped away, and where they have to reckon with their own powerlessness. And part of the pain of waiting comes from the growing disparity between the waiter's perceived time and [00:08:50] the time of the powerful. And so thinking about what waiting meant to the colonies means that we can begin to see how time and power are not only interconnected, but also [00:09:00] a method of discipline and control within the British Empire.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:15] Hannah. [00:09:10] It's so human. It's so paternalistic. [00:09:20] Like you think about a parent and a child, right? We are always trying to instill patience in our kids. You are the one in charge, and they have to wait [00:09:30] for everything from a trip to the playground to a snack.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:09:34] There's a reason that a lot of colonists and imperial people use the family [00:09:40] metaphor. Mother country, colonial child, rebellious children, uncaring mother. You know, there are all of these [00:09:50] ways. And there's also a lot of temporal considerations of what is appropriate for a child. What would it mean to have a fully grown adult child as a colony?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:59] See, what's [00:10:00] going on is the colonists are waiting is that they are also growing. They are developing. They have their own ideas, their own sense of autonomy. They even help their [00:10:10] dad out.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:10:10] And after the Seven Years War, in a lot of ways, when the British colonists are celebrating their Britishness, they're also celebrating their adulthood that they're [00:10:20] contributing. They're not just peripheral anymore. They matter. They're important. They can do stuff. They're so cool. And at the same time, that deep desire for recognition, [00:10:30] in the same way that growing children desire recognition and approval.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:38] Hang on and forgive me for this, but [00:10:40] what happened during the Seven Years War that made the colonists feel like they mattered more?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:45] All right, first of all, seven Years war, global conflict, multiple major powers vying [00:10:50] for land and control in North America. We call it the French and Indian War because, well, that's the part the colonists were involved in. And when all was said and done, Great Britain [00:11:00] had won and they got Canada and the colonists felt like they had really helped out. Not everyone agreed.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:11:07] This is the moment when North American colonists are so excited [00:11:10] about being British. They feel so important because they've contributed so much, they think, to the success of the British Empire. Of course, there are different [00:11:20] opinions. Some of the British military commanders will remember the first half of the war, where it wasn't so successful because they blamed the colonists for not supporting the [00:11:30] military enough, not raising enough men, not raising enough taxes, um, smuggling and trading with the enemy. So different memories from the war will come to define [00:11:40] things.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:40] Isn't this also the same time period as when George Washington was feeling real unappreciated?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:46] Yeah, and actually, that's a good little microcosmic example [00:11:50] of how the colonists may have felt. George Washington was denied the rank and commission he thought he deserved in the British military as a proper Englishman who had served his country. [00:12:00] But here is what is important for everyone else. What happens during the Seven Years War is that Britain is funding monthly mail [00:12:10] packet ships.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:11] So boats with the mail every month.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:15] Exactly their war. The powers back home have to communicate with the military [00:12:20] in North America.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:12:21] There is a significant moment at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, where the British state says, yes, we have been funding these monthly mail [00:12:30] packet ships in order to fight this global imperial war. And we are going to now turn it over into civilian hands, and we are going to continue to maintain it. [00:12:40] And there is this burst of enthusiasm about the possibilities of imperial integration.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:46] Imperial integration, were we not integrated [00:12:50] already.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:12:51] When the English colonies are first established? There isn't a manual on how to establish a colony. There is [00:13:00] no big plan. They are throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. And even though Jamestown is now known as the first colony on the North American mainland, [00:13:10] that works. It's not because that's the first colony they attempt. In fact, it is at the long end of a lot of experiments. As a result of that, [00:13:20] there isn't a clear idea of how authority ought to be delineated and even more importantly, how it works in practice. Because [00:13:30] in the 17th century, when communications are even more challenging than in the 18th century, you have sort of [00:13:40] a recognition that local problems are going to be solved by local people as long as the aims of empire are maintained.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:49] So it's like, [00:13:50] okay, we took all of this land on this massive continent, and we've got people over there making sure that we can get what we want out of that land. But also, they are way over there, [00:14:00] and we can't talk to them every day or even every month. So as long as they basically do what we want, they can kind of figure the rest out for themselves.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:09] Keep us rich, [00:14:10] keep us powerful, figure out your own problems.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:13] But after the Seven Years War, things have changed.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:14:22] Especially [00:14:20] after the Seven Years War, there is an effort to reform the Empire because all of a sudden, the British Empire [00:14:30] has just absorbed so many new peoples and territories, and they are at the height of their power. And also [00:14:40] they are so burdened by debt, and they feel like there need to be these administrative changes that are going to help them figure out how [00:14:50] to handle these new people and new territories.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:53] It's like Parliament looks up from its desk and says, oh, dang, this is a lot to deal with. We really [00:15:00] need to be in control here. They set their sights on those 13 colonies and [00:15:10] those colonies.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:15:11] They always have identified themselves as Englishmen. They've thought of themselves as Englishmen and with the rights of Englishmen. But when [00:15:20] you get to. After the Seven Years War, there were these new reform efforts being made. And there's also a new communication system that's been established in the war. [00:15:30]
Nick Capodice: [00:15:30] These are the mail boats.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:31] These are the mail boats.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:15:32] These monthly mail package ships do this funny thing because royal governors, in their instructions, [00:15:40] are instructed that they have to write by every opportunity to their Superiors in Whitehall.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:47] The royal governors, by the way, were the guys [00:15:50] in charge of each colony appointed by the Crown. And Whitehall at this point in British history was the place with the government buildings in London. [00:16:00] In fact, the British government is still sometimes called Whitehall today. Anyway, the royal governors are now told they have to write to the powers that be [00:16:10] every month, which is a change.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:16:14] When there is no official mail system, where there is a monthly system where you have a schedule, [00:16:20] governors can pick and choose when to write, which means they can, within reason, like don't go six months without writing. They'll know. But you [00:16:30] have an opportunity to say, here's a problem that we're facing, and here's the solution we're proposing. And it's not 100% [00:16:40] correct according to the rules that you've laid out in Whitehall, but I think you'll agree that this is a really close fit, and it addresses [00:16:50] local concerns and addresses the big picture. But when you start having these monthly mail packet cycles and you miss one, then the Board [00:17:00] of Trade, which is the governing body in the Metropol that oversees correspondence with the governors, will go to ask, why didn't you write by the June boat? [00:17:10]
Nick Capodice: [00:17:10] All right. This is the end of salutary neglect. Before the Seven Years War, we were kind of allowed to do our own thing, you know, govern ourselves, [00:17:20] check in with Parliament when it made sense. But when that war ended, Great Britain put us on the leash.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:26] And for the royal governors, more communication [00:17:30] with the Metropole, aka London, aka the home base of the ever expanding British Empire might not be a good thing.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:17:39] So now governors [00:17:40] are being told they have to report everything that is happening by every packet ship. In order to do that, they are having to present more problems without clear solutions [00:17:50] yet. And halfway through surgery, it looks like murder. So the Metropol constantly is being bombarded with news of like, oh my God, things are [00:18:00] getting out of control. And on the flip side, where the royal governors used to have this flexibility and sort of in the the flexibility of the old system before [00:18:10] the packet ships now in the system, they're not able to negotiate with the locals with as much flexibility. And they keep [00:18:20] being told, no, no, no, don't do this. No, no, no, that's not the right way to do it. At the same time that they are also not close enough to actually [00:18:30] get meaningful advice.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:31] It's like bringing in a new boss who doesn't understand just how things work in the office.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:37] Yeah, and then that boss doesn't answer you for six weeks [00:18:40] at a time, minimum.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:18:44] A governor? S letter could be sitting on a pile of letters on a desk for months in Whitehall, because [00:18:50] what's urgent to a colonial governor might not be so urgent when it's seen from London. But when governors act and they don't follow the rules to the dot, they get in trouble. When they [00:19:00] ask for advice, they don't get answers quickly enough while local time continues to go on, of course. And so they're sort of in this administrative and temporal straitjacket. [00:19:10] It's actually a revolution of rising expectations because there's this promise that communication and integration are possible. [00:19:20] And then the realities. It's not just a technological problem, it's an administrative problem. And it's also because things are almost good enough where colonists can sort [00:19:30] of glimpse at what might be possible without achieving it.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:34] A revolution of rising expectations.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:36] Oh, yeah. And we're going to get to that after a quick break. [00:19:40] We're [00:19:50] back. We're speaking with Helena You Roth about [00:20:00] what she calls colonial time consciousness and how it stoked the fires of a revolution.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:06] And just before the break, Hannah Helena said something about a revolution of rising [00:20:10] expectations. Can you get into that?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:12] Yeah. So Helena talked about an administrative problem. This big global war is over. The colonists contributed [00:20:20] to the effort in North America. There's a promise, like Helena said earlier, of communication and integration, of feeling, living, being. [00:20:30] Even more British.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:20:33] Colonists are practicing their Britishness. They're wearing their Britishness on their sleeves, literally, with the clothes that they wear, [00:20:40] the foods that they eat, and they really see themselves as part of this larger community.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:47] And for a long time, for decades and decades, with all that [00:20:50] distance and time and England being distracted as it turned itself into Great Britain, the 13 colonies could feel like they were a part of that community without [00:21:00] worrying too much about how much they really were a part of that community.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:21:06] There's this useful fuzziness that when you don't [00:21:10] actually push too hard, where everyone can be happy in their fuzzy understandings and misunderstandings.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:18] Happy in their fuzzy understandings [00:21:20] and misunderstandings. I think anybody could relate to this. So many things feel great and full of possibility. Before [00:21:30] you lay down the law, before you bring in rules and restrictions. It's the expectation of something versus the reality of it.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:21:39] You're having [00:21:40] These old colonies. So the colonies in North America, who were established in the 17th century, now having to grapple with the fact that they're [00:21:50] not so sure whether they are being considered as imperial subjects alongside the new imperial subjects, including the French Canadians, who are now [00:22:00] British subjects after the Seven Years War, or native people or people of color, or if they're members of the nation, because they always have identified themselves as Englishmen. [00:22:10] They've thought of themselves as Englishmen and with the rights of Englishmen.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:17] And they have acted like Englishmen, [00:22:20] not just in the clothes they wear and the food they eat, but in the way they run things.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:22:26] It was the growth and maturation of their local systems [00:22:30] and cultures, such as the establishment of colleges and local bar associations and things like that, where they have more [00:22:40] and more the infrastructure of self-governance.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:43] But after the war, the colonies have less self-governance.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:48] And that time and distance, [00:22:50] the thing that had allowed us to be fuzzy and happy, all of a sudden, it's going to be one of those things that makes us feel like we're being choked. Helena [00:23:00] explained that the colonists have this idea of Britishness.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:23:05] These colonists, remember, have inherited 17th century ideas [00:23:10] of what it means to be English. So they have these expectations that maybe colonists in different parts of the Empire who have just been absorbed don't. And so [00:23:20] there are these old understandings, these old practices with these new imperial reforms and these new administrative practices. And really, honestly, [00:23:30] too much optimism and too much excitement in a way that can't possibly be satisfied. And it creates what I think of as sort of a [00:23:40] pressure cooker effect.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:42] See, unlike the colonies that Britain acquired after the Seven Years War. Like formerly French Canada and formerly Spanish Florida, the [00:23:50] 13 colonies had this long history of being English. They're not like the new acquisitions.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:23:58] They fundamentally [00:24:00] share this sort of history of the English Civil War. And then with the restoration and then with the Glorious Revolution, which establishes a [00:24:10] constitutional balance. And this is what makes them English and then soon will become make them British. And it's this idea that they have this protected relationship with [00:24:20] the Crown and with Parliament, and that the colonists themselves see their own local assemblies as little parliaments that they themselves are building on this model. [00:24:30] There are also ways in which they desperately want the approval of the people back home That there is this longing for acceptance, [00:24:40] especially as people are becoming more sophisticated, but people are becoming more sophisticated in part because they go, keep going back to the mother country, that [00:24:50] elites send their children back for education.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:52] So in some ways, just to achieve the Britishness the colonists want, they literally have to get on a boat to [00:25:00] London to get it.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:25:01] All of their fashion, all of their news, all of their interests. They are constantly waiting. It is a position of deference in some ways.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:09] And of [00:25:10] course, it takes a while for the colonies to shift their perspective, their longing for Britishness. But that's something they can only really get from Britain from [00:25:20] far away. They've mimicked British governance, but now Britain is cracking down with new reforms and new controls.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:28] Stamp acts, Townshend [00:25:30] acts, sugar acts, tea acts.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:31] All of which we have talked about in other episodes, which I will link to in the show notes. But the point is, the pressure is building. And remember, [00:25:40] Nick, there are human beings in this story. They want things. They feel confused, hurt, left out. [00:25:50]
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:25:50] It's emotional. And I think one way I think my work contributes to this literature is by saying, it's not that people's feelings are [00:26:00] hurt because of the way in which power is used against them. Time is used against them. They feel like the deck is stacked against them. They can't participate. [00:26:10] It's not just a problem right now, but that there's something wrong with the system. But this is not sustainable. Maybe it worked before, but it doesn't work anymore.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:20] And [00:26:20] eventually the system changes. Helena told me that many historians consider 1774 as the turning point. Britain [00:26:30] was punishing Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. It had passed the coercive acts Blockading ports, taking over governance and justice, housing troops [00:26:40] at colonial expense. Boston and the surrounding area became the stage for months of battles between the British troops and the [00:26:50] rebelling colonists.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:26:56] You are seeing the British military really on the populace, and [00:27:00] there's this other moment that I think is part of that story that really that awakens the possibility of independence for colonists. [00:27:10] And it's not just the siege of Boston, but its evacuation, where the British military had been starved by the American colonists, [00:27:20] that the siege of Boston has actually starved the military instead, and that all of a sudden, these poorly [00:27:30] fed British military soldiers are having to go back into their ships and leave. And Abigail Adams writes, [00:27:40] you know, in wonder about this. And she says, to what a contemptible situation are the troops of Britain reduced? And so the colonists [00:27:50] really can't believe that the British are really, really retreating. It's this moment where colonists sort of see that they might be able to exist without the Empire, [00:28:00] that the empire is not actually as strong as they imagined. They see it as real people who are themselves overwhelmed and far [00:28:10] from the decision makers. So I think that is a moment where people sort of start realizing that they don't have a great plan. The British, as they're evacuating, don't have a plan. [00:28:20]
Nick Capodice: [00:28:20] Because the people who make the plan are thousands of miles and many weeks away.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:28:25] And that is something that I trace, that shifts in this revolutionary [00:28:30] moment where I look at the center of gravity of Communications. There's an amazing line in common sense that hasn't been really [00:28:40] understood enough, I think.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:42] Common sense. I was wondering when we were going to get to Thomas Paine.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:28:46] He's 37 years old. He's a mostly bankrupt former [00:28:50] corset maker, shopkeeper, tax collector, schoolteacher, proto union organizer who had advocated for higher wages for civil servants, and a parliamentary pamphleteer [00:29:00] and lobbyist with a recommendation from Ben Franklin and a talent for political writing. He arrives. He quickly becomes the editor of a magazine called the Pennsylvania [00:29:10] magazine, and he's immersed in the vibrant political life of colonial Philadelphia.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:15] And Paine writes Common Sense, a pamphlet advocating for American [00:29:20] independence from Great Britain.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:29:23] And Paine's point is really simple. He says, quote, to be always running 3 or 4000 miles with a tail [00:29:30] or a petition waiting for five months for an answer. Well, in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:38] So he's saying, basically, [00:29:40] this is embarrassing. We're not being treated like grownups and we're not acting like grown ups.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:48] And to Helena's point, Payne [00:29:50] understands the problem with distance, time, and patience.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:29:57] The revolution that Payne demands is not just a [00:30:00] political one or a constitutional one. It's temporal. He's declaring independence not just from British rule, but from British time. And this particular [00:30:10] sentence, the next one that I'm going to read, doesn't make it into the final draft of Common sense, but it really captures the political and psychological toll of living in multiple timelines, he says. A [00:30:20] greater absurdity cannot be conceived of than three millions of people running to their sea coast. Every time a ship arrives from London to know what portion [00:30:30] of liberty they should enjoy.
Nick Capodice: [00:30:32] Wow.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:33] Yeah.
Nick Capodice: [00:30:34] Chills. Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:35] I know. You know, when common sense came out, right?
Nick Capodice: [00:30:38] Uh, 1776. [00:30:40]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:41] Yeah. But actually, I mean, the day because the specific day matters.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:30:47] By late 1775. Pain is not just [00:30:50] writing common sense. The text that we would come to know as common sense. But doing math because pain puts together his knowledge of transatlantic communications rhythms with [00:31:00] the political rhythms of the metropole together to ensure that common sense hits the bookstands in Philadelphia and colonial readers at the right time. [00:31:10] And he has this amazing letter in 1779 where he explains how he did it, and, of course, take it with a grain of salt, because this is looking after the fact. But he says, as [00:31:20] I knew the time of the Parliament meeting and had no doubt what sort of King's speech it would produce, my contrivance was to have the pamphlet come [00:31:30] out just at the time the speech might arrive in America. And so fortunate was I in this cast of policy that both of them made their appearance [00:31:40] in the city on the same day.
Nick Capodice: [00:31:42] Hold on. What speech?
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:31:44] The thing that arrives on January 9th, 1776, is George II's speech [00:31:50] to Parliament rejecting the olive branch petition and condemning his rebellious subjects. And this news is arriving the very [00:32:00] same day that Thomas Paine's common sense is being advertised in the Philadelphia newspapers. Paine's timed the publication of Common Sense to coincide [00:32:10] precisely with the arrival of the speech, rejecting the petition, and it becomes a deliberate act of revolutionary synchronization, one that forges [00:32:20] an artificial simultaneity between monarchical rejection and revolutionary rebuttal. And in a world where colonial readers are used to waiting, guessing, [00:32:30] and reacting. Common sense reads like a revelation, a response to imperial authority that arrived not months later, but in real time. This [00:32:40] carefully manufactured simultaneity between the king's rejection and Paine's call for independence gives common sense, this really powerful immediacy. And for [00:32:50] colonists who are used to feeling like they're always playing catch up to imperial news, it's electrifying.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:59] What pain [00:33:00] does is revolutionary, not just in terms of content. He is merging the timelines. He drops common sense on the very day [00:33:10] that it will have optimal impact. All of a sudden, there is something happening right away. There is something originating in the colonies that has [00:33:20] to do with something that is coming from thousands of miles away.
Nick Capodice: [00:33:24] After 150 plus years of being on a constant delay.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:33:29] So in that way, [00:33:30] you know, common sense is more than just a pamphlet. It's a temporal intervention. It sort of names and indicted the lived experience of colonial delay, the endless [00:33:40] cycles of sending petitions, awaiting for replies and living under the shadow of decisions made months earlier in a distant capital.
Nick Capodice: [00:33:48] A temporal intervention. [00:33:50]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:51] Yeah. A radical perspective shift. All of this waiting that's running to the coast for stale scraps from the [00:34:00] dispassionate overlords. Thomas Paine says it. It's absurd.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:34:06] So there's this moment at which colonists say, [00:34:10] enough is enough. And then there is this sort of the clapback moment that I love is after the colonists have declared independence. [00:34:20] Richard Howe, who is a British commander who has been granted a dual role as naval commander and he's [00:34:30] supposed to be a peace commissioner. He had set off from London in May. He arrives in July off the coast of Staten Island, [00:34:40] aboard a ship called the Eagle. And he hears about the Declaration of Independence. And he's unable to get off of his ship because [00:34:50] he knows that once he sets foot on the ground, he's going to have to address the Declaration of Independence. But the instructions that he got from London when he left May [00:35:00] are insufficient. And now he is experiencing that colonial dilemma where the instructions no longer make sense, and he's going to have to act. And what does he do? And so [00:35:10] he stays cooped up on the ship for weeks trying to figure out what to do. And for me, that is the perfect encapsulation of sort of [00:35:20] the imperial officials at the highest level are now living what it means to be like colonists. The center of gravity of communications. Local [00:35:30] events have overtaken local time has overtaken imperial time.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:35:39] There are [00:35:40] so many versions, so many facets of the story, of how we kept time on our side, how we used distance and delay to our advantage [00:35:50] in the Revolutionary War and beyond. How we became the center of our own universe instead of orbiting around the British sun. But [00:36:00] we also kept that awareness of exactly how powerful the widening gyre is, how things can [00:36:10] fall apart, how the center might not hold.
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:36:17] American settlers are going to keep moving west, and [00:36:20] their capitals are all on the east where they first established them. So they're going to be wrestling with those questions of time and distance for a long [00:36:30] while. There are ways in which the early Republic really grapples with this question of what will it mean to be a nation whose borders [00:36:40] continue to grow and how will we maintain. And the Post Office is a huge part of that story. That the idea that post [00:36:50] is key, that print culture and newspapers and letters are going to create these ties that bring us together [00:37:00] and keep citizens informed at the furthest stretches. And that tells you something really important about how they're thinking about distance.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:37:09] When you think about [00:37:10] the rising tensions leading up to the revolution, Nick. All of the acts and the taxes and the petitioning and the waiting and the feeling ignored [00:37:20] and left out, you begin to realize that distance and time is silencing you.
Nick Capodice: [00:37:29] Taxation [00:37:30] without representation.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:37:32] Right. It's unconstitutional. Not the American constitution. The British one. It was, as the colonists saw it, [00:37:40] their right as Englishmen to be heard, to be taken into account. It was one of the biggest problems then. And it is one of the [00:37:50] biggest problems right now. Where is the center of power and how much time and space is between [00:38:00] that and the people?
Helena Yoo-Roth: [00:38:02] Do they feel like their voices are heard in the cities where the decisions are being made? How can representatives [00:38:10] really. How does representation work when you have a country that is so large and people have to travel so far? So these are things [00:38:20] that we're going to keep wrestling with in the House of Representatives. How often should a representative be B and d c and how often should they be back home listening to their constituents? It's a problem of representation. [00:38:30]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:38:45] This [00:38:40] episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Marina Henke is our producer. [00:38:50] Dana Cataldo is our digital producer, and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. Helena Yoo-Roth's upcoming book is called American [00:39:00] Timelines, Imperial Communications, Colonial Time Consciousness, and the coming of the American Revolution. Keep an eye out for that one. Civics 101 is a production of [00:39:10] NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.