Of course he went to the Quaker City, and speedily became the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, through the pages of which he cried a new message of liberty and justice to the troubled Colonies. He, an Englishman, urged America to break away from England; he, of Quaker birth and by heredity and training opposed to fighting, advocated the most stringent steps for the consummation of national freedom. In that clear-eyed and disinterested band of men who conceived and cradled our Republic, Paine stands a giant even among giants.
Many persons believe that it was he who actually composed and wrote the Declaration of Independence; it is certain that he is more than half responsible for it. The very soul and fibre and living spirit of the United States was the soul and fibre and living spirit of Thomas Paine, and, in the highest American standards and traditions, remains the same today.
In 1775 he wrote "Common Sense"—the book which was, as one historian declares, the "clarion call for separation from England," and which swept the country. Edmund Randolph drily ascribes American independence first to George III and second to Paine. Five hundred thousand copies of the pamphlet were sold, and he might easily have grown rich on the proceeds, but he could never find it in his conscience to make money out of patriotism, and he gave every cent to the war fund.
This splendid fire-eating Quaker—is there anything stauncher than a fighting Quaker?—proceeded to enlist in the Pennsylvania division of the Flying Camp under General Roberdeau; then he went as aide-de-camp to General Greene. It was in 1776 that he started his "Crisis," a series of stirring and patriotic addresses in pamphlet form. General Washington ordered the first copy read aloud to every regiment in the Continental Army, and its effect is now history.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox has written of this:
"... Many of the soldiers were shoeless and left bloody footprints on the snow-covered line of march. All were but half-hearted at this time and many utterly discouraged. Washington wrote most apprehensively concerning the situation to the Congress. Paine, in the meantime (himself a soldier, with General Greene's army on the retreat from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Newark), realising the necessity of at once instilling renewed hope and courage in the soldiers if the cause of liberty was to be saved, wrote by campfire at night the first number of his soul-stirring 'Crisis.'"
It was before Trenton that those weary and disheartened soldiers,—ragged, barefoot, half frozen and more than half starved—first heard the words that have echoed down the years:
"These are the times that try men's souls!"
They answered that call; every man of them answered Paine's heart cry, as they took up their muskets again. It was with that immortal sentence as a war slogan, that the Battle of Trenton was won.
Is it any wonder that in England the "Crisis" was ordered to be burned by the hangman? It was a more formidable enemy than anything ever devised in the shape of steel or powder!