political literature, "Common Sense," which appeared in January,
1776. "A style hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic,"
wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to the
crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and
it was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who
was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. "The Crisis,"
a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in
December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that
the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the
sword of Washington. "Paine, who was now serving in the army,
might have heard his own words, "These are the times that try
men's souls," read aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged
troops just before they crossed the Delaware to win the victory
of Trenton. The best known productions of Paine's subsequent
career, "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason," were written
in Europe, but they were read throughout America. The reputation
of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from certain grimy
habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was no more
an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original
thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy
and to shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor
which transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear
as a trumpet.

Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his
literary services to the Revolution are less likely to be
underestimated than Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish
speech in "the Fields" of New York City in 1774 and with "The
Farmer Refuted," a reply to Samuel Seabury's "Westchester
Farmer." They were continued in extraordinary letters, written