Many historians would subsequently assert that late in the afternoon, officers gathered their men a mile from the river and, at Washington’s direction, read aloud from a new pamphlet by the writer known to soldiers as “Common Sense.” Little evidence supports such group readings, although Thomas Paine’s febrile essay, published a week earlier in Philadelphia and now circulating through the ranks, captured the spirit of the army with which he had recently marched across New Jersey. Paine again condemned both loyalists (“servile, slavish, self-interested”) and the king (“a sottish, stupid,
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