◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Stand. I was a failed corset-maker from England — twice out of work, once bankrupt, with no education but the kind a man gives himself. Benjamin Franklin handed me a letter and told me to try America. I arrived in 1774 with nothing but a talent for plain speech and a hatred of kings. In January of 1776 I put that talent to use in a pamphlet I called Common Sense, and I wrote it so that any farmer or any sailor could understand every word — because I believed, and I believe still, that an ordinary person, given the facts in plain language, can reason as well as any lord. The pamphlet asked the one question the colonists had been afraid to ask aloud: why should an island rule a continent, and why should any man be born to rule another? I wrote that a hereditary ruler is as absurd as a hereditary poet, and that one honest man is worth more to the world than all the crowned ruffians who ever lived. Half a million of you read it. And you decided to be done with kings. So permit a dead man his astonishment, when he looks on you now and finds you weary of governing yourselves and casting about for a strong man to do it for you. I did not cross an ocean and spend my life and my good name to trade a king in London for a king in your own house. If you crown one because you are tired, you will have unlearned the only thing the Revolution had to teach. But I know why you are tempted. You are tired, you are frightened, and the hour looks dark. I know something about dark hours. In the winter of 1776 the cause was nearly lost. Washington's army was melting away in the cold, men deserting by the hundreds, the whole enterprise about to collapse. And I sat down by a campfire and wrote the words they read aloud to those freezing, doubting men before they crossed the Delaware: these are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in such a crisis, shrink from the service of their country. Hear the distinction, because it is everything. The summer soldier serves when it is easy and quits when it is hard. The sunshine patriot loves the country on the days the country is winning. Anyone can stand in the summer. The republic was never preserved by the people who turned out only for the parade. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. But I told them then what I tell you now: the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Do not mistake me for a man who was rewarded for any of this. I died in this country nearly alone. Six people came to my grave. They called me an infidel and denied me a quiet burial, and years later a well-meaning fool dug up my bones to honor them and then lost them — so that to this day I have no resting place anywhere on earth. I am the man who gave you the words, and I have no grave. I tell you that not for pity, but so you will believe me when I say this: the work was never about the reward to the one who does it. The words outlived the ingratitude. They always do. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. That offer has not expired. It is the standing inheritance of every generation that refuses to quit. So do not be a summer soldier. Do not be a sunshine patriot. Stand.