ty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of
his endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says
Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his
eyes," and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him
as an "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position
on the "Pennsylvania Magazine." Before he had been a year on American
soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our 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 during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of
the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation.
Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new
Constitution, but as a d