ABSTRACT
The epigraph from Thomas Paine suggests that he privileges the power of cohesion over the feebler workings of attraction. One of the apparent virtues of cohesion is its representability in a "visible figure", and people might expect that Paine's interest in this "figure of matter" derives from its rhetorical potential as he seeks to persuade the colonists of the necessity for their binding themselves into a union. Strange as it may seem to people, Paine thought his greatest contribution was his invention of the single-arch iron bridge. The bridge, capable of uniting the banks of previously unspannable rivers, was manufactured first in a 90-foot model, in order to have "exposed to public view" the "truth of the principle" on which it was erected. When Paine argues in The Crisis for the independence of the colonies, he frames his discussion with the dangers besetting the colonists.
