Common Sense with Paul Jacob

March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws, and his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.

In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith first published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”

On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine (pictured) is believed to be the essay’s author.

The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.

Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Ironically, Johnson was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro” and the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally-recognized as a lifelong slave in England‘s North American colonies. The first official chattel slave in English-speaking North America was of African descent, and was owned by a man also of African descent.

On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States. (She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.)

| The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the reason this site, ThisIsCommonSense.com, exists. (It continues, however, only through the continued support of readers like you.)

| On this day in 1820, the Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, brought Maine into the Union as a free state, and made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.