The most famous opening sentence in American political writing was composed in retreat. Paine wrote The American Crisis #1 in December 1776, in the woods between Newark and Trenton, on the back of a drumhead by candlelight while the Continental Army was disintegrating around him. He had marched out of New York in November with about seven thousand men. By the time the army crossed the Delaware on December 8, fewer than three thousand were still under arms. Enlistments expired on December 31. New Jersey had switched its allegiance back to the king.
Paine took the manuscript to Philadelphia and put it in print on December 19 in the Pennsylvania Journal. Washington had it read aloud to every regiment on the night of December 23, before the crossing back over the Delaware to attack Trenton. The Hessian garrison there was caught at dawn on December 26. The campaign turned. The country survived.
We read the opening sentence as inspirational. Read in the December 1776 light it was meant for, it is not. It is an admission that men are about to leave. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country: that is not a rallying cry, it is an indictment. It is a sentence written about the men who are not yet on the line, addressed to the men who are. Its purpose is to make the latter not envy the former.
The second-most-famous line is the one we never quite get right:
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
The line is Stoic. It is the same argument Cicero gives in the Tusculan Disputations. Paine had been reading the Romans during the long evenings in Headstrong-Club Lewes; he carried that diction through every political tract he ever wrote. The Stoic frame is the alibi for asking ordinary men to do extraordinary things. The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph is not, in the Stoic register, a promise. It is a definition.
What is Crisis #1 in 2026? Read it cold and the surface is brittle. The pamphlet is short, six pages, written in two days, designed to be read aloud at a campfire in the time it takes to boil water for coffee. It is full of references to specific places (Fort Lee, Hackensack, the Highlands), specific officers (Lord Howe, General Lee), specific calumnies (the Tory tavern keeper at Amboy who told Paine to his face that he hoped to see one good war). It does not generalize. The whole thing is local.
But it works on a reader two and a half centuries later because it is not arguing about the war. It is arguing about a habit of mind. The pamphlet is one extended case for the proposition that a free country requires its citizens to do unpleasant things on schedule. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth.
The capitalization is Paine’s. Foner reproduces it; Conway reproduces it; we reproduce it. The capitalization is the sound of a pamphleteer raising his voice across a crowded room.
In December 1776 Paine could not have known he had written one of the dozen pieces of American writing that would still be read in centuries. He thought he had written a piece of campaign literature. He did not bother to put his name on the masthead. He put on the byline only the words By the author of COMMON SENSE, because he assumed the audience would know what that meant, and the audience did. He took no royalties; he gave the press the manuscript free. By his death thirty-three years later, the Crisis papers had been printed in editions on three continents and translated into five languages. The drumhead-by-candlelight version of the legend is romantic but accurate.
What stays with you, reading Crisis #1 in 2026, is the rhythm of public obligation. Paine writes as if a citizen has a debt that comes due on calendar dates the citizen did not choose. The debt is not metaphorical: it is the December enlistment, the January marches, the February quartering, the March pay arrears. It is the work of being a citizen in a country that has not yet decided whether it will continue to exist.
The full text is at /works/the-american-crisis-1/.