Paine's American Pamphlets
Stuart Andrews shows how Tom Paine not only popularised the idea of American independence but helped to keep the spirit of Union alive through seven years of war.
In the closing months of the War of Independence Thomas Paine wrote proudly but not unfairly of the part he had played in the propaganda battle:
It was the cause of America that made me an author... and if, in the course of more than seven years, I have rendered her any service, I have likewise added something to the reputation of literature, by freely and disinterestedly employing it in the great cause of mankind, and showing there may be genius without prostitution.
He was thinking, not only of Common Sense, published anonymously in January, 1776, but of the series of pamphlets he wrote between December, 1776, and December, 17S3, under the general title of The American Crisis .
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