PAINE, MCCHESNEY AND NICHOLS

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“America was called into being by a journalist. When Virginia plantation owners who would become presidents were still pondering petitioning to King George III, when a Boston lawyer who would also be president was fretting about the excesses democracy might unleash with the replacement of colonial rule, good Tom Paine argued in the Philadelphia Journal that Americans had a right to govern their own affairs. Within weeks of his arrival on American soil in the fall of 1774, months before the “shot heard round the world” was fired at the North Bridge in Concord and a full year and a half before the penning of the Declaration of Independence, Paine outlined “the essence of liberty” as self-governance by informed and empowered citizens…”