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!
A list of Paine's services to this country would be too long to set
down here.
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