Written during the heady days after the three American victories in West Jersey and published on January 13, 1777, the second installment of Paine’s thirteen numbered “The American Crisis” essays had a different tone from the first. No more times that try men’s souls or shrinking sunshine patriots, “The American Crisis, No. II,” written in the form of a taunting letter to Lord Richard Howe, sounded confident, even arrogant. “The character you appear to us in is truly ridiculous,” it began. “Had your powers been ever so great, they were nothing to us, farther than we pleased; because we had the same right which other nations had, to do what we thought was best” for us.
The pronouns “us” and “we,” Paine made clear, referred to the American people, which he equated with the nation. “‘The United States of America’ will sound as [stately] in the world or in history as ‘The Kingdom of Great-Britain,’” he declared at the outset, again with the people replacing the king as the fount of nationhood.
In this second essay, Paine then turned his scorn on Howe’s recently issued proclamation calling on members of Congress to disavow their claim of independence much as New Jersey delegate Richard Stockton had done when captured in December. “Why do you say, ‘their’ Independence?” Paine asked. “To set you right, Sir, we tell you, that the Independency is ours not theirs. The Congress were authorized by every State on the Continent to publish it to all the world, and in so doing are not to be considered as the inventors, but only as the heralds that proclaimed it, or the office from which the sense of the people received a legal form.” We the people, Paine asserted, declared American independence and only we the people could disavow it. This, he suggested, might seem foreign to an agent of Britain, where Parliament ruled and a king reigned.
In 1776, independence replaced liberty as the patriot battle cry, but to Americans at the time the two words carried a common meaning: freedom under popular rule.
By seeing the United States as a people rather than as a government or army, and drawing on the experience of 1776, Paine argued the case for American victory. “By what means, may I ask, do you expect to conquer America? If you could not effect it in the summer when our army was less than yours, nor in the winter when we had none, how are you to do it?” Paine asked the British admiral. “Your authority in the Jersies is now reduced to a small circle that your army occupies, and your proclamation is no where else seen unless it be to be laughed at.” He maintained that an armed invader could not subdue a people. “In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with; in this case you have both an army and a country to combat with,” Citizen Paine lectured Lord Howe. “Were you to garrison the places you might march over, in order to secure their subjection, (for remember you can do it by no other means) your army would be like a stream of water running to nothing.” America was simply too vast to occupy so long as the American people resisted. “The more surface you spread over, the thinner you will be, and the easier wiped away.”
Privately, Howe recognized as much by this point. After long believing that most Americans favored reconciliation, in December he conceded to his secretary about the patriots, “Almost all the People of Parts & Spirit are in the Revolution.” Subduing them could only be achieved and sustained “by the Sword,” his secretary responded.
“I consider Independence as America’s natural right and interest,” Paine concluded in this second Crisis essay much as he had a year earlier in Common Sense. “This is my creed of politics.” The events of 1776 had deepened his resolve even if they dimmed his hopes for a quick victory. In his early-January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Paine boasted about the Americans, “Our present numbers are sufficient to repel the force of all the world” and predicted that they would “receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months.”
In his late-December 1776 essay “The American Crisis, No. I,” he admitted about the British, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” The year-ending triumph at Trenton restored Paine’s faith that the Americans would prevail even if he no longer believed it would come quickly. “It is remarkable that in the campaign of 1776 you gained no more, notwithstanding your great force,” he wrote ostensibly to General William Howe in a later Crisis essay, “while every advantage obtained by us was by fair and hard fighting.” With the king and Parliament having granted Howe’s request for more troops and ships, the hard fighting would continue into 1777.
The military campaign of 1777 proved as inconclusive as the one in 1776. It again started late, featured strategic blunders, and left the two sides in a roughly equivalent position as when it began. For the Americans, it took time to enlist soldiers with three-year terms of service for a new Continental Army, but, by the end of May, the foundation of a stable force with some 9,000 troops left winter quarters in Morristown with Washington still focused on defending Philadelphia. Britain’s northern army had pulled back to Canada for the winter, and General Burgoyne had gone home to England. He did not return to Quebec until May and did not renew the invasion of upstate New York until mid-June.
This time the British easily captured Fort Ticonderoga. But with the veteran general Horatio Gates taking command of American defenses and militia units streaming in from New England and New York, Burgoyne’s army became bogged down in the thick forests around Saratoga. Burgoyne had counted on General Howe’s sending troops north from New York City to support his invasion. By the time he realized that Howe had other plans, Burgoyne had cut his supply lines to Canada and was being surrounded by Continental and militia forces outnumbering his own troops by more than two to one. His entire 6,000-soldier army surrendered on October 17.
Offsetting this loss, the main British Army force under General Howe had taken Philadelphia on September 26 after sailing around New Jersey by ship, defeating the Americans at the Battle of Brandywine, and entering the city from the south. Congress again fled, this time to Lancaster and then York, Pennsylvania, where it remained for nearly a year while the British occupied Philadelphia. Receiving word in Paris of both the victory at Saratoga and loss of Philadelphia on the same December day, Franklin used the former to secure a treaty with France in February 1778 that opened trade between the two countries and established terms for a military alliance. More aid and some French troops began reaching America that year.
The resulting war between Britain and France forced the British to send ships and soldiers to defend their West Indian sugar colonies from the French, which strained British resources and drew sea and land forces from North America. Nevertheless, hard fighting continued between the Americans and British until October 19, 1781, when a French and American force under Washington compelled the surrender of a British and Hessian army under Cornwallis after a three-week siege at Yorktown, Virginia. Two years later, Britain recognized American independence in the Treaty of Paris.
Paine had predicted this outcome in an earlier American Crisis essay purportedly written to Lord Howe that compared the military phase of the American Revolution to a game of checkers. “We can move out of one square to let you come in, in order that we may afterwards take two or three from one,” Paine wrote about the Americans. “You cannot be so insensible as not to see that we have two to one the advantage of you, because we conquer by a drawn game, and you lose by it.” Simply by avoiding “a total defeat,” Paine reasoned, the Americans could secure their independence because he “never could see any real disservice it would be to Britain.” As he viewed it, England was a nation of shopkeepers and merchants—a phrase used by Adam Smith in the 1776 edition of The Wealth of Nations—and, as Paine noted in this essay, “If an English merchant receives an order and is paid for it, it signifies nothing who governs the country.” Eventually those merchants and their representatives in Parliament would opt for peace and compel the king to agree, he implied.
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Warfare represented only one aspect of the American Revolution, and hardly the most important one. “What do We mean by the Revolution?” John Adams later asked Jefferson. “The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.” Adams found evidence of this revolution in “the Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamphlets, [and] Newspapers in all the Colonies…by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.” While Adams saw this revolution in popular opinion beginning before 1776, it surely culminated in 1776 with new state constitutions, pamphlets by Paine and others, and a flow of newspaper articles, including those reprinting Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence. Through arguments advanced in these documents over the course of 1776, a fight for rights and reconciliation became an American war for liberty and independence.
Declaring independence, as Common Sense pleaded, the colonies proposed, and Congress proclaimed, gave a clear goal for the patriot cause. Colonists might oppose taxation without representation or reject the authority of Parliament to pass laws binding them in all cases whatsoever without knowing what concessions would constitute victory. By equating liberty with independence, patriots gained a definite objective and a fixed end point for their struggle. In 1776, independence replaced liberty as the patriot battle cry, but to Americans at the time the two words carried a common meaning: freedom under popular rule.
Four score and seven years later, in his 1863 address at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln singled out 1776 as the year when the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lifting whole phrases from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln elevated 1776 over 1787, when the founders framed the Constitution, or 1791, when the states ratified the Bill of Rights, and placed human equality on a par with individual liberty in the pantheon of American values. In doing so, he followed a generation of American abolitionists and women’s rights advocates as reflected in William Lloyd Garrison’s 1833 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, both of which appealed to the legacy of 1776 in asserting rights to human equality under law.
As Lincoln understood the Declaration of Independence, the promise of “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” applied to all. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he professed. For Lincoln, it was an aspirational document of ongoing relevance that “contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere” and not merely “an interesting memorial of the dead past.” Its proclamation by Congress gave enduring meaning to 1776.
1776 still matters because…that signal year marked a turning point in the human quest for liberty and equality under popular rule within the context of national independence.
Beginning with Common Sense and the British bombardment of Norfolk, ending with “The American Crisis, No. I” and the Battle of Trenton, and punctuated midway by the Declaration of Independence and British atrocities after the Battle of Fort Washington and during the occupation of New Jersey, the words and deeds of 1776 marked a year of fundamental change. Subjects of the king became citizens of their states. Royal colonies became sovereign republics. Customary traditions gave way to self-evident truths. Long-held hereditary hierarchies fell before the asserted equal creation of “all men,” however poorly applied at first. Status-based privileges became inalienable rights, at least for some and increasingly for more. Congress’s Resolution on Independent Governments spawned written state constitutions and declarations of rights that became global models. Foreseeing this, Franklin published these constitutions and declarations in Europe. Words inspired deeds that inspired more words leading to what Lincoln would depict in the Gettysburg Address as government of, by, and for the people.
While social and political change takes time and remains contingent, words and deeds matter even if their consequences are unpredictable. “There is a tide in the affairs of man such if taken at the Flood lead on to Vict’y,” the American artillery commander Henry Knox, seasoned at twenty-six and paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Brutus, wrote on January 7, 1777, four days after the Battle of Princeton. Having reached winter quarters at Morristown with Washington’s soldiers by that date and begun seeing most of them quickly depart for home, he added, “I am not too Sanguine, I don’t think, that the Army of America is established firmly. The Fate of War is uncertain.” Accepting that tides drive human affairs, Knox believed that for humans to reach their goals, they must take those tides at the flood and resist them at the ebb. He saw 1776 as flood times for independence.
In the course of that one year, a critical mass of British subjects in eastern North America collectively decided to declare their thirteen colonies free from imperial rule, frame the outlines of their republican states, and achieve enough to the make their revolutionary demands likely to prevail against Europe’s preeminent power. The tides that these Americans took in 1776 arose from forces in human affairs stretching back into the remote past and extending forward into the then distant future, even to the present day. They were not the product of a single year or any one country. Yet after 250 years, 1776 still matters because, for Americans generally and others across the globe, that signal year marked a turning point in the human quest for liberty and equality under popular rule within the context of national independence.
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From Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters by Edward J. Larson. Copyright © 2025. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
