Key figures: Thomas Paine, George Washington, Nathanael Greene
Summary
The American Crisis is a series of pamphlets written by Thomas Paine during the American Revolutionary War, of which the first and most famous number was published in December 1776. Paine had emigrated to Philadelphia in 1774 and, in January 1776, published Common Sense, the pamphlet that made the popular case for independence. In the autumn of 1776 he joined the army in the field as a volunteer aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene, and he composed the first Crisis essay during the Continental Army’s demoralizing retreat across New Jersey, after the loss of New York City and the fall of Fort Washington and Fort Lee. By his own account Paine wrote the piece on the march, drawing on what he had witnessed of the army’s suffering and dwindling numbers.
The first number, titled The American Crisis, Number I, first appeared on December 19, 1776, and opened with one of the most quoted sentences in American political writing: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The essay went on to distinguish the committed patriot from “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot,” who “will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country,” and it argued that the very hardship of the moment gave the cause its worth: “what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” Like Common Sense, the pamphlet was signed with Paine’s pseudonym “Common Sense” rather than his name. It was issued as an eight-page pamphlet in Philadelphia and rapidly reprinted in newspapers throughout the states, giving it a wide circulation within weeks. The essay is often said to have appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal, though that newspaper had suspended publication in late 1776; it was reprinted in other papers, including the Pennsylvania Packet, as it spread.
According to a long-standing tradition, General George Washington ordered the essay read aloud to his assembled troops on December 23, 1776, as he prepared to recross the Delaware River and attack the Hessian garrison at Trenton on December 26, 1776. Paine was not present to witness the reading and never described it in his own recollections, and some historians therefore treat the specific account with caution; the essay’s language nonetheless became closely associated with the desperate confidence of the Trenton campaign, and its opening sentence was long remembered as a watchword of that movement. Paine continued the series through the war, publishing thirteen numbered Crisis essays between 1776 and 1783, along with several additional pieces under the same title, the last appearing as the fighting drew to a close.
Significance
The American Crisis, Number I is regarded as one of the most effective works of morale-building propaganda of the Revolutionary War. Appearing at the lowest point of the American military effort in 1776, it reframed a season of defeat and retreat as a test of resolve rather than a sign of defeat, and it circulated in the same weeks as Washington’s victory at Trenton reversed the campaign’s momentum. Its plain, urgent prose — the same accessible style that had made Common Sense a mass success — carried its arguments to soldiers and civilians alike. Phrases coined or popularized in the essay, including “these are the times that try men’s souls,” “the summer soldier,” and “the sunshine patriot,” entered the permanent vocabulary of American political rhetoric, and the pamphlet secured Paine’s standing as the Revolution’s foremost popular writer.