FEATURE Image: Thomas Paine, by engraver William Sharp (1749-1824), after portrait painter George Romney (1734-1802), 1793. NGA, London. Public Domain. See – https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw35502/Thomas-Paine?LinkID=mp03422&search=sas&sText=thomas+paine&role=sit&rNo=6 – retrieved June 1, 2024.
With the capture of Manhattan, British Army Commander in Chief William Howe sent Cornwallis to pursue Washington into New Jersey just sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Washington’s army was down almost 90% in December 1776 (3500 soldiers) from just August 1776. Washington just escaped Cornwallis’ grasp. As the British set up a line of forts to house and feed their soldiers during winter, Washington was the outsider. The British believed the end of the revolution of what they called “despised” and “undisciplined rabble” which Virginia planter George Washington led (by way of the efforts of troublemaker Massachusetts lawyer John Adams), was in hand. The British entered into winter by taking prisoner Charles Lee, one of Washington’s senior generals in the Continental army, and locked him up as well as their own fleet in Newport, Rhode Island which they took without resistance. The British kept Lee’s horse perpetually drunk out of spite for the Americans. Before Washington’s important crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 and surprised the mercenary Hessians, Washington’s first comeback victory, it was the lowest ebb of the war. Since July 1776, Howe had taken almost 5000 men as P.O.W.’s, including 4 generals, and hundreds of artillery pieces and many tens of thousands of Washington’s ammunition in the wake of winning battles. It was then that 39-year-old Thomas Paine, serving in Washington’s army, wrote this propaganda tract (his Common Sense appeared earlier in January) that began with the famous line. “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 it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. 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.” Washington wrote about the same events more soberly: “Our affairs are in a very bad way . . . the game is pretty near up—owing in a great measure to the insidious arts of the enemy.”
SOURCES: CHAPTER THREE. “The Peace Commissioners? THE HOWE BROTHERS,” The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History), Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Yale University Press, 2013, p. 96.
