Thomas Paine: The Crisis, No. 1

Glossary

• ague chills and fever
• bawdy-houses houses of prostitution
• dearness the quality of being expensive
• Gage General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the British army in America from 1763 to 1775
• Hessians German soldiers who fought for Britain during the Revolutionary War
• Howe British general William Howe, commander in chief of the British army in America from 1775 to 1778
• impious lacking respect or reverence
• Jerseys New Jersey, at the time divided into East and West New Jersey
• Joan of Arc fifteenth-century French military heroine and Catholic saint
• King William eleventh-century British king William the Conqueror
• Major General Nathanael Green a general in the Continental army
• “peace which passeth all understanding” a loose quotation from the biblical book of Philippians, chapter 4
• sottish drunken
• Tory in America, a British Loyalist
• Voltaire the pen name of the eighteenth-century French author François-Marie Arouet
• Whigs in America, supporters of the revolution against Britain