Thomas Paine's The Crisis and the Words Read Aloud to a Freezing Army

Most political writing is dead before the ink dries. A handful of sentences from the American Revolution are still alive, and one of them, by a tradition that is probably true in spirit if not provable in detail, was read aloud to soldiers standing in the cold with the enemy across the river. If you want to know what words can do, that is the place to start.

The essay is the first of Thomas Paine's Crisis papers, published in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776. It is a short piece of writing, a few pages in print, and it was aimed at one problem: an army that was about to evaporate. This post reads it the way the Founders read things, closely, quoting the text exactly and asking what each line was doing. Then it asks the harder question, which is why it still works on us.

The Man and the Moment

Paine had come to the colonies from England only in late 1774, with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. In January 1776 he published Common Sense, a pamphlet that argued for independence in plain language that ordinary people could follow, and it spread through the colonies with astonishing speed. By the end of that year he was serving with the army as a volunteer and watching it retreat across New Jersey.

The situation was the one I describe in Crossing the Delaware on Christmas Night and the Ten Days That Saved the Cause. New York had been lost. Fort Washington had fallen. The army was shrinking, and the term of enlistment for most of the troops would end on the last day of the year. Morale was low, and every day more people were asking whether the cause could be saved. Paine saw the danger better than most, because he had seen the retreat from the inside.

So he wrote. The essay appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal, and later as a pamphlet. A familiar story says Washington had it read to the troops in the days before the crossing on the night of December 25. I should be honest that the story rests on a biography written decades later, and historians have found no order or eyewitness account that proves it. It is plausible that the pamphlet circulated in camp, and the tale fits a commander who understood that a failing army needs reasons to stand as much as it needs ammunition. I would not tell you that the essay alone produced Trenton. I will tell you that it was written for exactly that moment, and it did its work on readers in the army and out of it.

The Opening Passage, Line by Line

The essay begins with the most famous paragraph in American political prose. Here it is, as Paine wrote it:

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Take it apart. The first sentence is a statement of fact about the moment, and it is built on a word, try, that meant in the language of 1776 what it means in the phrase "to try a case": to test, to put under strain. The times do not make men's souls; they reveal them. The sentence is a promise that some will be found wanting.

The second sentence names the two kinds of people who will fail the test, and the names are masterpieces of compression. The summer soldier is a man who fights when the weather is good and the cause is winning. The sunshine patriot is a man whose love of country is a fair-weather feeling. Neither is accused of treason, and notice that the insult is delivered in two words each, a feat today's press releases cannot manage in two paragraphs. The charge is something worse for the army to hear in December, which is that each is a man who will go home when it gets hard.

Then the turn: "but he that stands by it now." Paine does not say "he that wins." He says "stands by it," sticks with it, bears the weight. The reward he promises is not victory but "the love and thanks of man and woman." Look at that last phrase. He includes women. In the winter of 1776, when the army was made of men, he reminded them that the people at home, the mothers, wives and sisters who were also bearing the war, were watching too.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

This paragraph is the heart of the argument, and it contains three separate claims.

One: tyranny is hard to defeat. Paine compares it to hell, which is a theological joke with an edge: you do not get out of hell by wishing. He is telling the soldiers the truth about the odds. That honesty is part of the strategy. A leader who tells you the fight is easy loses you at the first reverse.

Two: difficulty is the proof of value. "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." This is a claim about human nature that any parent or teacher will recognize. We do not value what costs us nothing. If freedom could be had for free, it would be treated as a free thing. Paine turns the cost into the meaning: the high price is the evidence that the thing is worth having.

Three: a Providence stands behind the price. "Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods." This is the Judeo-Christian assumption that ran under the entire Revolution. Paine was no orthodox believer, a point I take up in Thomas Paine, a deist, argued for independence from the Book of Samuel, but he wrote for an audience that heard Scripture in the background of every sentence, and he knew it. He calls freedom "so celestial an article." That is not the language of an economist. It is the language of a man who thinks liberty is the sort of thing that has a divine price tag.

The Argument About Providence and Panic

A little farther on, Paine reaches for a different kind of reasoning. He writes:

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

This sentence does two things at once. First, it concedes that Paine is a skeptic. He does not claim to be a mystic. He is a man of reason saying that his reason leads him to this conclusion. Second, it makes a moral argument about the colonists' conduct. They had petitioned, they had argued, they had tried every "decent method" to avoid war. Having done so, they had earned the right to believe they were in the right.

That is a point the Declaration of Independence makes in its grievance list, where the colonists record that their petitions had been answered only by "repeated injury." The colonists were not looking for a fight. They had been patient, and the patience was part of their case. For the full charge sheet see The Grievance List in the Declaration Reads Like a Charge Sheet Against Power.

Then there is the line about the courage of the individual, which has the dry sound of a man who has watched men weigh their choices:

'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Hold that sentence against the first one. The summer soldier shrinks. The man of firm heart pursues "his principles." The difference is not strength or skill. It is whether you have something you believe in that outweighs the cost. Paine does not tell the soldier he will survive. He tells him that a man with a clear conscience and a firm heart will stand either way. For people about to cross a river in a storm, that was exactly the right thing to say.

What the Essay Does Not Do

Notice what is absent. There are no statistics, because Paine had none worth quoting, and no focus group told him to call it a messaging framework. There are no promises that the army will win, because he could not make them honestly. There is no hatred of the enemy as people; the target is tyranny, and the faults he names are cowardice and complacency among his own side. The essay asks for something and offers something: it asks for endurance and offers the respect of a free people.

It also leaves out any claim that the cause is easy. This is why it has lasted. A great deal of political rhetoric today works by telling the audience that victory is certain, or that the other side is so wicked that it will fall over on its own. Paine does the opposite. He treats his readers as adults who can hear the worst and decide to stay anyway.

The Strongest Objection

A skeptic will say something like this, and the skeptic is not a fool.

The objection says: This is propaganda. Paine wrote to manipulate soldiers into risking their lives. Calling people "summer soldiers" for wanting to go home is a shaming tactic, and rhetoric that exploits fear of social disgrace is not a noble thing. Besides, the real reasons armies stay together are pay, food and discipline, not essays.

The objection deserves an answer in four points.

1. Concede what is true. Rhetoric is persuasion, and persuasion works partly by emotion. Pay and supply matter enormously. The army that survived that winter needed all of them, and I described how badly it lacked them in Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army.
2. The difference between propaganda and argument is whether the claims are true. Everything Paine claims, that tyranny is hard to defeat, that the colonists had tried peaceful remedies, that the army's endurance mattered, was accurate. He asked the men to do something dangerous and told them why. A lie asks you to act without knowing the facts. This essay put the facts and the stakes on the table.
3. The men were free to say no, and some did. This was a volunteer army. The essay did not compel anyone. It appealed to a conscience, and it assumed the conscience was there to appeal to. That assumption is the opposite of propaganda's assumption.
4. Shaming cowardice is a moral act, not a trick. Every serious tradition of ethics distinguishes courage from cowardice and calls the second a vice. If saying "do not be a coward when your neighbors are counting on you" is manipulation, then every sermon, every coach's talk and every parent's lecture is manipulation too. A free society needs people who can say it, and people who can take it.

Why It Still Speaks

The words were written for soldiers, and that is not who most of us are. But the situation Paine describes is common. It is any moment when doing the right thing has become costly and quitting has become easy.

You can find it in an ordinary civic life. A school board meeting that runs four hours over a curriculum fight. A local election with a handful of volunteers and a long list of tasks. A neighbor who is told by friends to keep quiet about something that matters. A family trying to hold to a standard in a culture that treats the standard as old-fashioned. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot are not historical figures. They are a temptation that each of us meets.

What Paine gives us is a way of seeing it clearly. First, the hardness is not a sign that you have made a mistake; it is part of the price. Second, the price is the proof that the thing is worth having. Third, stand now, because the time to stand is when it is hard.

There is a tie to the Founding in all this. The Constitution begins with "We the People," and it depends on citizens who will do the unglamorous work of self-government. A republic, as Franklin is said to have told a woman outside the Constitutional Convention, is something "if you can keep it." The line is attributed rather than documented, so take it as tradition, but it makes the same point as Paine. Liberty is kept by those who keep showing up.

The Case in Brief

1. Paine's first Crisis essay, published December 19, 1776 and traditionally said to have been read to Washington's troops, was written to hold an army together when its enlistments were about to expire.
2. "These are the times that try men's souls" means that hardship reveals character, and the summer soldier and sunshine patriot are those who leave when the weather turns.
3. "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly" is the argument that the high price of freedom is the evidence of its value, set inside an assumption that Providence prices its goods properly.
4. The essay is argument and not propaganda because its claims were true, it left its readers free to choose and it told them plainly how hard the fight would be.
5. The lesson for citizens is to stand when standing costs something, because a republic is kept by people who do not quit.

What you can do: read the first paragraph of the first Crisis aloud to your family or a friend, then name one local task, a board meeting, a volunteer shift or a vote, that you have been tempted to skip, and show up for it.