General Washington ordered the first copy read aloud to every regiment in the Continental Army, and its effect is now history.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox has written of this: "...

Many of the soldiers were shoeless and left bloody footprints on the snow-covered line of march.

All were but half-hearted at this time and many utterly discouraged.
Washington wrote most apprehensively concerning the situation to the Congress.

Paine, in the meantime (himself a soldier, with General Greene's army on the retreat from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Newark), realising the necessity of at once instilling renewed hope and courage in the soldiers if the cause of liberty was to be saved, wrote by campfire at night the first number of his soul-stirring 'Crisis.'" It was before Trenton that those weary and disheartened soldiers,--ragged, barefoot, half frozen and more than half starved--first heard the words that have echoed down the years: _"These are the times that try men's souls!"_ They answered that call; every man of them answered Paine's heart cry, as they took up their muskets again.

It was with that immortal sentence as a war slogan, that the Battle of Trenton was won.
Is it any wonder that in England the "Crisis" was ordered to be burned by the hangman?
It was a more formidable enemy than anything ever devised in the shape of steel or powder! A list of Paine's services to this country would be too long to set down here.