Thomas Paine: The Crisis, No. 4

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Writing nine months after the first issue of The Crisis, on September 11, 1777, Paine again leads off the fourth issue with a summary of the year's fighting. He makes no mention of the Saratoga campaign that was even at the time of his writing unfolding in Upstate New York. The British army in Canada had intended to march south down the Hudson Valley to link up with the other major British force stationed in New York City. Instead, a smaller American force was able to delay it, break it up with raids and diversions, and eventually (by October 17) defeat it and capture its remnant. This victory was the decisive event of 1777. It resulted in the declaration of war by France and other European powers against Britain on America's behalf.

Paine, however, had uppermost in his mind the fighting around Philadelphia, with which he was more directly concerned since he was working in the city at his newspaper and helping to prepare the correspondence of the Continental Congress. In late August the main British army from New York began to be transshipped to the mouth of the Delaware River (eschewing another march through New Jersey) south of the American capital. On September 11, 1777, the British defeated and nearly destroyed Washington's army at the Battle of the Brandywine. (Paine's rather fantastic description of the American defeat may charitably be called confused rather than fabricated, owing to lack of definite information.) The British again moved directly on Philadelphia. When Paine realized what had happened—initially from hearing cannon fire through his office window—he immediately set to work on the fourth issue of The Crisis, writing through the night and handing it to the publisher the next morning. This, too, would eventually become a widely circulated pamphlet, but it had little immediate effect on the flight of almost the entire Patriot population from Philadelphia. Paine tried to organize a militia to resist the British in house-to-house street fighting, but with almost no one except Loyalists left in the city this proved impossible. The British entered Philadelphia on September 26, and Paine fled the next night to Trenton, knowing that if he fell into the hands of British authorities he would be executed for treason.

Facing nearly the same situation he had at the beginning of the previous winter, Paine renews his crisis metaphor, in more explicitly medical terms. “The nearer any disease approaches to a crisis, the nearer it is to a cure. Danger and deliverance make their advances together, and it is only the last push, in which one or the other takes the lead.” Paine's readers would know that a physician of the period might well expect a disease to go through a series of crises before it was finally resolved.

Paine likewise renews his Fabian analysis of the military situation, hammering home to his audience the very difficult-to-accept message that momentary military defeat was irrelevant in the long run. The military and political situation he is explaining to his readers here (especially in his apparent lack of detailed knowledge about events in Upstate New York) was in many respects similar to that which existed at the time of his writing the first Crisis essay, as Paine is himself well aware: “[The British Commander] Howe has been once on the banks of the Delaware, and from thence driven back with loss and disgrace: and why not be again driven from the Schuylkill?” referring to the different river obstacles that separated the British army from Philadelphia in 1776 and 1777. The new part of Paine's message in this pamphlet is his call to the people of Philadelphia to resist the impending effort of the British to occupy the city:

You are more immediately interested than any other part of the continent: your all is at stake; it is not so with the general cause; you are devoted by the enemy to plunder and destruction: it is the encouragement which Howe, the chief of plunderers, has promised his army. Thus circumstanced, you may save yourselves by a manly resistance, but you can have no hope in any other conduct.

Paine spells it out very plainly to the citizens of Philadelphia that they risked losing their property and even their very lives to the British if the army occupied the city unopposed, so it was in their best interest to resist the British soldiers step by step through the city. He is overly optimistic about the prospect of help from Washington's badly disorganized army to the south and also from the American army in the north (in New York), since it was heavily (and victoriously) engaged in maneuvering between Saratoga and the Canadian border and could do nothing for Philadelphia. In the event, the Patriots of Philadelphia chose to flee rather than to fight, and the British did not sack the city but instead occupied it to strengthen the support of its remaining Loyalist population. After London, Philadelphia was the largest and richest city in the British Empire, hardly a place to be destroyed lightly by the British army.

Paine was more prophetic in his closing address to Howe, the British commander. His fleeting success in taking the American capital would make no difference in the long run. British victories did little to defeat the American military strength, as dispersed and great as it was, springing up everywhere in the form of militias and new recruits (with over a quarter million Americans seeing some form of military service during the Revolution). In contrast, the British projection of military power, which depended on transatlantic supply lines, was too fragile to sustain even the losses of victory. Anticipating Howe's capture of Philadelphia, Paine tells him, “What you now enjoy is only a respite from ruin; an invitation to destruction; something that will lead on to our deliverance at your expense.” The declaration of war on England by France and other European powers after Saratoga would make the British position untenable.