Number LXXXVII September 14, 1776
Number LXXXVIII September 21, 1776
Number LXXXIX September 28, 1776
[print edition page ix]
Once again, serendipity has helped set the course of my academic life. I happened to be at a Liberty Fund gathering in June of 2012 on the British debate over Colonial American resistance, 1764–1776, when The Crisis came up in conversation. Hans Eicholz, of Liberty Fund, and Jack Greene, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins, were discussing the possibility of bringing out a scholarly edition of The Crisis—all ninety-two issues of it under one cover. I had written an article about this London weekly a few years before. They agreed that I was a logical choice for editor of a Liberty Fund compilation, and, four years later, here we are. Jack and Hans are fine scholars; I am flattered by their trust in me. Jeremy Black, at the University of Exeter, and Timothy Breen, now emeritus at Northwestern, were kind enough to read over my introductory essay. Pat Gallagher and Laura Goetz championed my cause at Liberty Fund. Laura skillfully copyedited and guided the manuscript through to Dan Kirklin, who expertly took the manuscript into production and handed it off to Otto Barz at Publishing Synthesis for typesetting. Kate Mertes then did the index. Bill Pidduck, publisher and chairman of Adam Matthew Digital, generously shared what his team had done with The Crisis in its online Eighteenth Century Journals Portal (www.amdigital.co.uk) so that this edition could be produced.
What Liberty Fund does to make historical texts available to modern readers reflects a rare commitment to the life of the mind. It is an honor to be associated with such an effort. I am quite certain that the men behind The Crisis would marvel at what Pierre Goodrich, founder of Liberty Fund, made possible through his vision and by his generosity.
Neil L. York
[print edition page x]
[print edition page xi]
EPITAPH on the Cruel Death of CRISIS,
HERE to the flames poor CRISIS was configu’d,
His body is consum’d, but not his mind,
For, from his ashes, many forms shall rise,
TRUTH may be burnt alive, but never dies.1
So observed the Morning Post about The Crisis, one member of the London press lamenting the passing of another, even as it sought to reassure readers that the quest for truth would not be deterred. As it turned out, The Crisis did not die a “cruel death,” despite the efforts of government authorities to suppress it.2 The third issue, which appeared on 4 February 1775, had been burned publicly at the order of Parliament. And yet, The Crisis continued to be printed for more than another year and a half, ninety-two issues in all, much to the irritation, no doubt, of those who hoped the public burning, followed by the prosecution of one of the publication’s presumed printers, would crush it.
[print edition page xii]
But the men behind this weekly, men every bit as shadowy now as they were then, had made it clear that they would not be easily intimidated. “The CRISIS will be carried on with spirit, in defiance of Lawless Power, upon the true principles of the Constitution,” they informed London readers as they prepared the first issue for publication. They pledged “even at the risk of every thing that is dear to man, to rescue the Liberty of the Press, the Natural Rights of mankind, and the Constitution of the British Empire in England and America, from that Ruin with which they are now threatened.”3 That they continued to print The Crisis each Saturday for so many months to come, was a testament to the growing power of the press and to the rise of a public whose political voice could not be silenced by legislative fiat or judicial decree.
The Crisis pursued its political objectives with a vituperative intensity that set it apart from its contemporaries in the London press. The Crisis oozed sarcasm from its pages; its sardonic tone most likely added to the anger of policy makers even as it fed the appetite of readers who relished the irreverence. It cleared the literary ground that others, perhaps most famously Thomas Paine in his Common Sense, would later seed. Nonetheless, different plants grew from this rhetorically similar soil. Paine criticized one king as a first step toward condemning monarchy altogether; the men behind The Crisis never went that far. For all of their complaints against crown and parliament, for all of their warnings that the wrongs committed against Americans might next be visited upon Britons, they did not advocate overthrowing George III. When rebellious Americans decided on an independent republic as the solution to their imperial problem, they and the authors of The Crisis parted ways. However hard The Crisis had worked to create a transatlantic community of protest, however much it drew on a philosophical tradition equally appealing to dissident colonists, their social circumstances and the political ideology that grew out of them were fundamentally different. Thus The Crisis provides a study of contrasts between what became revolution in America but remained protest in Britain.
[print edition page xiii]
Just as Paine was not the first to put the call for “common sense” to good polemical use, there were others who had already titled their efforts at political consciousness-raising The Crisis. More than sixty years earlier, Richard Steele’s pamphlet of that title urged readers to rely on their “common sense” and support the Hanoverian succession, thereby upholding the principles of the Glorious Revolution and preventing any return of Stuart absolutism. Parliament, Steele instructed readers, embodied the notion that all legitimate government was based on consent; the authority of the crown, he admonished, had to be limited because “absolute Power in one person” was but “clandestine tyranny;” and the people, he stressed, could justifiably resist any attack on their constitutional rights because those rights came from nature, not government.4
Where Steele focused on the British Isles, the anonymous author of The Crisis published in 1766 looked beyond them, to the larger empire, when protesting against the Stamp Act and the flawed thinking that led to its passage. He condemned any attempt to tax the colonists directly as unconstitutional, but he, like Steele before him, appealed to reason rather than emotion and avoided ad hominem attacks; stylistically, neither anticipated what would be done in The Crisis reprinted here.5
That far more strident Crisis debuted in London on 21 January 1775 and appeared weekly, without interruption, through 12 October 1776. More like a brief pamphlet than a true newspaper, a typical issue ran six pages with perhaps three thousand words in total, each issue composed of a single essay with nothing else to accompany it: no general news and
