The Crossing by Howard Fast

recorded in the Hessian notes. He brought information from Philadelphia to sell to the Hessians, and since the information would have to contain enough drama to earn its price, he told Colonel von Donop that the people in Philadelphia were “hard at work fortifying the city.”
    However, another informant told Colonel von Donop: “From the way they are doing it, the work will not be finished in two years,” which was less dramatic but more truthful.
    By the eighteenth of December the Hessian commanders were beginning to satisfy themselves that no enemy worth their apprehension or their effort still existed on the west bank of the Delaware River. During the next three days they would reinforce that observation, and by Christmastime they would be willing to write off the Continental army entirely.

[28]
    FOR TWO WEEKS, the mood of the people of Philadelphia had been one of total despair concerning the cause for independence and the security of their city. On December 19, however, the Pennsylvania Evening Post cheerfully published the following:
    â€œThere is no doubt that the enemy will be repulsed with great slaughter, if they should attempt to cross the river.”
    This kind of boastful confidence was not actually founded in reality, but it was helped by the publication on the same day, December 19, 1776, of Thomas Paine’s first Crisis paper.
    Thomas Paine had been with the American troops all through the month of November, during their retreat through New Jersey and most likely up to the point of their first crossing of the Delaware River from east to west. It is difficult to ascertain what position he held during that period. Some of the men on that march suggest in their memoirs that he was brevetted an officer of sorts, and this is just possible, so loosely were officers made and unmade then. Washington took a great liking to Paine; and the two of them, Washington and Paine, spent many hours discussing the meaning and the direction of the war. Paine informed Washington that he would attempt to write something that might help the army, and Washington was enthusiastic about his project. They both shared a sort of mystical faith in the power of the printed word, and the astonishing success of Tom Paine’s book, Common Sense, had left every literate person in America with the feeling that somehow Paine’s pen could perform miracles.
    This was hardly the case, and it is doubtful whether, after the November retreat of the American forces, even a miracle would have changed the depressed mood of the defeated soldiers.
    However, when Paine left the troops at the Delaware, he had already written some pages of manuscript. Legend has him sitting among the shivering troops in the light of a campfire, writing down the words of the first Crisis paper. But the greater likelihood is that he only jotted down notes of the retreat—as so many others did—and actually wrote the Crisis in Philadelphia.
    There, he had it printed in a Philadelphia weekly, the Pennsylvania Journal, and the first bundle of newspapers came off the press either late on the eighteenth of December or perhaps very early in the morning of the nineteenth. In any case, on the morning of the nineteenth, Paine had a rider load his saddlebags with copies of the newspaper and gallop off post haste to the encampment. The rider must have left sometime before dawn, because Washington had the first Crisis paper in the morning and read it through at luncheon on the same day. There is evidence that Washington was thrilled with what Paine had written, for he immediately ordered copies of the Pennsylvania Journal distributed up and down the river to every brigade, with instructions that it be read aloud at each corporal’s guard.
    â€œThese are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country, but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks