Not every writer could command the eloquence of Tomas Paine. But nearly everyone shared Paine’s belief that the struggle was hugely important, Loyalist and American patriot alike set to work eagerly to expose folly and injustice and convert the reader. Whether the writer’s immediate aim was to stir the emotions, to ridicule the enemy, or to convince by patient reasoning, in all cases a certain urgency still communicates itself to the reader. Controversy aloes not on its own create good writing; yet it is usually a powerful aid. For the infant nation, victory in the war and for the republican principle came as a heartening overture. The United States was brand new, or almost so; old errors and temptations had been shunned, and the book of history lay open at a clean page. The former Puritan confidence in posterity had been retained, as we can see from Paine’s words; but though Puritan optimism had not been rosy enough to embrace human nature, the emphasis in these glad deistic(自然神教的) days now shifted from duties to rights, from innate depravity to innate virtue.