Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776)

Open it expecting a treatise and you find something closer to a man talking fast, plain, half-amazed that anyone ever agreed to take monarchy seriously. Thomas Paine had been in the colonies barely a year, an Englishman with nothing to lose, and he wrote for the farmer reading by firelight rather than the lawyer reading by candle. The daring is not the argument, which had drifted through parlors for years, but the nerve to say it flatly: that hereditary succession is an insult to reason, that a king is not necessary but absurd, that breaking away is only common sense. He gave a people the words for a thing they already half-believed and could not yet bring themselves to think aloud. More than a hundred thousand copies passed hand to hand within months, and Washington had it read to his troops. You can hear, in its scorn and its speed, the sound of a country deciding to stop asking permission.