It was in the air. Everyone was talking about the possibility of it. Six months earlier Thomas Paine had written one of history’s great essays about English tyranny, a brutish king, bad policies being decided and administered from 3,000 miles away, and “The Common Sense” of becoming independent from it all. The exercise of freedom of the individual and colonies  through “independence” was seen as those incontrovertible ideals and ideas that could raise the weak, and bring the downfall of the mighty and tyrannical.