In 1775, before he wrote Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote a poem about a tree — and that tree was already shaping the American Revolution.
The story of the American Revolution is usually told through famous documents and famous men, but some of the earliest and most powerful symbols of colonial resistance weren't speeches or armies at all. One of the first was a real elm tree on Boston Common — and one of the first writers to capture what it meant was a brand-new immigrant from England named Thomas Paine.
In this episode of The Way the World Works, we read Thomas Paine's 1775 poem "The Liberty Tree" — written before Common Sense made him famous — and unpack what the poem (and the real elm tree on Boston Common that inspired it) tells us about the ideas already rooted in the colonies before the Revolution began. We talk about the Stamp Act, why colonists chose a tree as their rallying symbol, how the British cutting it down backfired, and how Paine's writing carried ideas that George Washington himself admired.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Who Thomas Paine was before he wrote Common Sense — a brand-new immigrant from Britain in 1774
- What Paine's 1775 poem "The Liberty Tree" actually said and why it mattered
- The real Liberty Tree — an elm on Boston Common that became colonial America's rallying point
- How the Stamp Act of 1765 turned an ordinary tree into a political symbol
- Why the Sons of Liberty chose a tree, not a building, as their gathering place
- Why symbols matter even when ideas are the real thing — and what a flag teaches us about that
- How the British cut down the Liberty Tree in 1775 — and why it backfired
- Why ideas are "bulletproof" even when their symbols are destroyed
- How Paine's poem foreshadowed his more famous Common Sense
- Why George Washington admired Paine despite calling himself "not an ideas man"
- How the rights Americans were fighting for were already part of the old English tradition
- Why families should read revolutionary-era poems and documents together this America 250
Timestamps
0:00 Why Paine's Poem About a Tree Matters
1:15 Who Thomas Paine Was Before "Common Sense"
2:30 Reading "The Liberty Tree" Poem
3:30 A New Immigrant Captures Liberty
4:30 Why a Tree Became a Symbol of Resistance
5:30 The Real Liberty Tree in Boston
6:30 Liberty Was Already in Our Soil
7:15 The British Plot to Cut It Down
8:10 When They Cut It Down, It Backfired
9:00 Ideas Are Bulletproof
10:00 Paine Inspires Common Sense and Washington
11:00 Many Ways to Fight for Liberty
12:00 A Challenge: Read the Poem with Your Family
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💬 Comment below: What's a modern-day "Liberty Tree" — a symbol that captures an idea worth fighting for?
Shop Resources
📘 Dive into the full story of the Revolutionary War in The Tuttle Twins America's History Volume 2 (1776-1791)
https://www.tuttletwins.com/products/americas-history-vol2
📘 Discover stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things in The Tuttle Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes
https://www.tuttletwins.com/products/the-tuttle-twins-guide-to-courageous-heroes
📚 Get Tuttle Twins books and homeschool resources: https://tuttletwins.com
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