Citizen Tom Paine Read online

  “I don’t mind my smell,” Paine grinned.

  “But we do!”

  “I don’t go the way the wind blows,” Paine said evenly.

  “I know what I have to do, or I am beginning to. I wonder whether you do, Rust? I wonder whether you know what all this is?”

  “It’s standing up for our rights as free Englishmen, by God!”

  “Is it?”

  “And we mean to fight for them!”

  Paine shrugged and turned away.

  And for some, nothing at all had changed. Paine went to a ball given by the Fairviews, wealthy importers of Tory leanings. They had him because he represented the Pennsylvania Magazine; Paine went because he had to have answers, many answers and coming from all sides, answers to his doubts, his longings, his prayers, his hatreds. Four pounds bought a coat of fine, brown broadcloth, a better garment than any he had ever put on his back. He wore a ruffle at his throat, a new white wig, and good leather breeches, a gentleman right enough with a stick and a three-cornered hat, invited to the best, stepping into quality on his own, into a hall lit by four hundred candles, where a Negro slave called melodiously, “Mister Thomas Paine!”

  Four hundred candles, and heaven was never lighted brighter. Black servants walking with silver trays and silver punch bowls, mounds of dainty cookies and cakes, cold meat from twelve different kinds of game and enough Claret, Madeira and Port to float the British Navy. The women were in heavy, brocaded gowns, gilded, silvered, the men in lace and satin and velvet, and he was Mr. Thomas Paine, his opinion asked on everything.

  “This Lexington business—of course, a rustic rabble, but here in town, did you see the beggars trying to drill?” They had all been to Europe at one time and another.

  “And for one who’s seen the King Guards!”

  “But, Mr. Paine, what line does an editor take, I mean, a man with a head on his shoulders?”

  “I don’t fancy a rebellion—I don’t fancy anything more than a lot of noise and shouting.”

  Mr. Paine said practically nothing.

  “It doesn’t help trade.”

  “On the other hand it does. People get frightened, and then they buy like mad.”

  “Really, a straw in the wind. I fancy Lord North will take his sails in after he gives them a sound drubbing.”

  “I read your magazine faithfully, Mr. Paine,” said a young woman, well-gowned, lovely, looking at him with admiration, he, Paine, the staymaker. “I read your poems,” she said. “I think they’re beautiful and that a man who writes poetry cannot help but have a soul, don’t you think?”

  “I think many people have souls.”

  “Do you? Now isn’t that frightfully clever. I can’t say clever things, but that’s frightfully clever.”

  They had punch, cakes, and they walked in the gardens. There was a moon and stars, and finally she said how strange it was that he had never married.

  “I was married.” After a moment or so, he said his wife had died.

  “What a terrible tragedy!”

  “Yes.”

  “But don’t you think it made you a better, a broader man, Mr. Paine?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not listening to me at all, Mr. Paine.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?”

  He wrote a piece for the magazine called Reflections on Titles. He was restrained. Again and again, he told himself, what happened to me does not matter. I must write as I think and know and reason and believe, so people will listen. They must listen.

  He had it out with Aitken. Reflections on Titles struck at the privileged class and struck at them hard. He was not one of the mob, not one of the militia drilling on the Commons, not even one of the Congress party. Instead, alone, he groped in the dark and sought for direction, desperately and sometimes wildly. All the times before he had failed; now he must not fail.

  “You will not print that,” Aitken said.

  “But I will!”

  “Then ye part from me!”

  “If you want to let me go, let me go. No halfway measures,” Paine said.

  He became persuasive. “Thomas, have we not always got together on one thing an’ another, notwithstanding the arguments?”

  “Yes?”

  “An’ why will ye be stirring in that devil’s broth of rebellion?”

  “Do I print it?”

  “Print it an’ be damned, an’ have yer notice!”

  Paine shrugged. He had been given his notice before, and he no longer cared. He still worked with the Pennsylvania Magazine, and finally he had kicked it off the fence and bent it to his own purposes; but as a part of his life, it was over. What the next part of his life would be, he didn’t know, any more than he knew what would be here in America. It was not that he was animated by resolve so much as tension, and all that he could hope for was both nameless and formless.

  On May the fifth, Benjamin Franklin returned to America, his mission in Europe over, all the long years there, considered politically, coming to nothing, an old man come home to a boiling country. He took up his residence at Market Street with the Baches, and there, after a few days, Paine managed to see him. Franklin had a half hour for Paine, no more; there were too many threads he had to pick up in America, too much to be done in too short a space of time. But he remembered Paine and shook his hand and said that he had been looking through the Pennsylvania Magazine; it was good; it was clever and it made bright reading.

  “Do you like America?” Franklin asked.

  Paine nodded; there was much he wanted to say, yet he didn’t know how to say it. Having thought to himself for so long that of all the men he had known, Franklin was the wisest, the deepest, and the best, he was now strangely dissatisfied, almost antagonistic.

  “You’ve found yourself,” Franklin said.

  That was trite, Paine thought, foolish almost. He had found nothing. “What is going to happen?” he asked Franklin. “Will there be war?”

  “War? If fighting is war, yes. There has been fighting; there will be more.”

  “But what does it come to?” Paine demanded, almost fiercely. His next thought was that it was cruel to badger this old man, this very tired old man. “Where are we going—?” For the first time, Paine felt and realized in himself a hard, driving cruelty. He didn’t have to ask where they were going; for himself, he was going only one way, and each day it shaped itself more clearly.

  Franklin said, “We have to be strong, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? Once we are strong enough, the ministry will see reason. There’s no need for war, never any need for it. War is bad.”

  “As one would say salt is salty,” Paine thought.

  “We want our rights,” Franklin went on. “We want our freedoms, we want our decencies, our privilege to live a full and good life—that makes good men, the chance to work and put a shilling by, to have a piece of land and a roof overhead. We are not owned part and parcel by England; they must realize that partnership and conciliation—”

  “And what of independence?” Paine asked.

  “Do we want that?”

  “I don’t know,” Paine said tiredly. “When I was a little boy, even then, I felt that certain things should not be. And when everyone else accepted those things, I thought I was mad, that the devil rode on my shoulders. Can you build anything good on a rotten foundation?”

  “Old men don’t make revolutions.”

  “My God, sir,” Paine said, “you’re not old! You gave me back my youth!”

  The next week, a second Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia.

  Once more men from all the colonies converged toward Philadelphia. The militia put on a show, and welcomed and welcomed, as if to prove that all their drilling was not for nothing. Back and forth they marched, until their feet ached, and those of them who could afford horses made a cavalry troop to ride out and meet the delegates. “God and Jesus,” men said to one another, “that we should live to see this, the port of
Boston under siege by the British, the Congress back here in town, and old Ben Franklin still alive and here again.” They were back again, the Adams cousins, Hancock, Randolph of Virginia, Jefferson, this time with another Virginian, a big man who like a stage performer wore a magnificent uniform of buff and blue—he was a colonel of the Virginia militia and his face wasn’t familiar in Philadelphia; Washington was his name; he walked with long, gangling steps and hardly ever opened his mouth, shy, stupid perhaps. Paine was introduced to him by young Tom Jefferson; “Colonel George Washington of Virginia,” and Paine squinted at him.

  “I’m glad to meet you, sir. Delegate?”

  “I’m a writer,” Paine said, as if to justify himself. “I edit the Pennsylvania Magazine.”

  “Yes, of course.” But obviously, he had never heard of the Pennsylvania Magazine. He stood silently, looking at Paine, as if he could think of nothing to say, and afterwards Jefferson explained, apologetically, “He’s very wealthy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Perhaps the wealthiest man in America, but land poor, like many of us Virginians. Not clever, but he has guts.”

  “He wants to fight, and he doesn’t have to talk about it. People talk so damned much.”

  “What makes you think he wants to fight?”

  “The uniform. He’s not a clown.”

  “I didn’t think of it that way,” Jefferson said. “He’s an enigma to me.”

  Paine spent two days in his room, struggling to put down on paper what he thought. Then he went to listen to the Congress proclaim to the world that Americans had taken up arms for protection of their lives and property. Then he had beer with Sam Adams and Michael Closky, the expatriate Pole. Adams was violently furious, fanatically against compromise. Knowing he was despised by both the intellectuals and the gentlemen of the Congress, even by his cousin, John, he turned to these two whose violence, if not obvious, at least took strange directions.

  “You know what you don’t want,” Paine said quietly, after listening to a half hour of Adams’ denunciation. “That’s only anarchy. What’s positive? There is fire burning in a dozen parts of this country, but what does the fire mean?”

  It meant nothing, the Pole said. In his country it had been the same. Was this the first time the common man lifted up his head to revolt? Yet always it came to nothing.

  “The halfway measures,” Paine said. “The fence sitters. I’ll go so far and no further—”

  “How far will you go?” Adams asked him, peering curiously at this British staymaker, this broad, hulking, hook-nosed man with his slab-like peasant hands.

  “All the way,” Paine said softly.

  A little drunk, his stubble-covered face wavering in the light of the candle between them, Adams grinned like an imp and asked how far was all the way.

  “I want a new world!”

  “Utopia?” Adams said.

  “God damn it, no! What we have here, a way of life, a way for children to smile, some freedom, some liberty, and hope for the future, men with rights, decent courts, decent laws. Men not afraid of poverty and women not afraid of childbirth—”

  The Pole roared with laughter, but Adams’ face was suddenly serious. “Independence,” he said.

  “For a beginning,” Paine agreed, sleepy suddenly, tired before and not after the act, seeing his whole life arranged and frightening in its clarity. Now doubt was almost gone. Doubt, built up so slowly and painfully, had resolved itself. He knew some of the answers, and in a little while, he would know the rest.

  6

  HOW TOM PAINE WROTE A SMALL BOOK

  HIS PARTING from Aitken was curiously mild, and for the first time Paine realized that the Scotsman held him in some esteem and regarded him with a certain affection. Aitken, whom Paine had considered as far removed from emotion as a human being can be, shook his head stubbornly, and at first, when he gave Paine his hand, was able to say nothing at all. Paine knew it was not entirely the impending doom of the Pennsylvania Magazine that moved him; the publication was doomed, not only through its loss of its editor, but because the rising upheaval in the colonies made it already an antique of some vaguely remembered epoch. This whole peaceful land, which went on without much appearance of change—as lands do even when the world begins to burn—was inwardly bubbling and boiling and preparing to explode. Paine thought that Aitken knew it, not as a Tory, nor even as a rebel, but as one who losing security would lose all reason to live. Paine pitied him.

  “Ye will no’ change yer mind?” he asked.

  That was not the question, as Paine knew. A pound a week was good pay and more than enough to keep him comfortably, and what with things he had written for other publications he had some twenty pounds to fall back on. Perhaps he was a fool to give it up, the more so since the course he planned was very vague.

  “It is bread and butter,” Aitken pressed him.

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Think it over, Thomas. Ye’ll be sucked in with the madmen, an’ it’s no’ Christian, Thomas. Let well enough alone.” But when Aitken saw he couldn’t persuade him, the Scotsman said gruffly, “Ye’ll no’ hold a grudge, Thomas?”

  “Why should I?”

  “There are mean men an’ there are sweet men, but ye no go in a category, Thomas.”

  “I never held a grudge,” Paine said, “except against myself.”

  Tall, slim, fair as a girl and as comely as Paine was ugly, Tom Jefferson won him heart and soul. Jefferson was a gentleman in Paine’s memory of the sharp division of things in England, and the Thetford staymaker’s first reaction was one of sullen hostility. Jefferson was graceful and handsome and accomplished and clever, all that Paine was not, and in his first advances Paine saw only some petty need for the favor of the magazine. The gall in his soul poured acid on Jefferson, and admiring the man, thrilling with pleasure if Jefferson so much as nodded at him, Paine’s outward reaction was only to try and turn the Virginian into an enemy. Jefferson wouldn’t become an enemy; God only knows what he saw in the graceless staymaker, whose hands always had dirt under their nails; but whatever it was made him want to find the man beneath the crust. He pretended not to see the point in Paine’s caustic remarks, and met the editor on such a basis of easy equality that bit by bit Paine’s reserve disappeared. Being one of the inner circle of the Congress, Jefferson knew everything, met everyone, and was able to smooth things considerably for Paine. A few years younger than Paine, he combined fresh youthfulness and maturity in a manner that was, for Paine at least, completely charming.

  To share a pot of coffee with him was something that Paine looked forward to; dinner with him was sheer delight, and after an evening spent with him in front of a fire, Paine glowed with a warm happiness he had never known before. Slowly and deliberately, Jefferson drew from him as much as any man could of the story of his life; he had a wonderful knack of taking the confused memory and assembling it with meaning. He once said to Paine, “All in all, as it was, with the dirt, the privation, the misery, the gin and the utter hopelessness in the way you and those around you lived, that alone, terrible as it was, could have been endured—” The sentence hung in the air, and Paine tried to see what he was driving at.

  “Poverty is a degree of things,” Jefferson said. “I have seen people here in America whose poverty was complete and absolute, yet they retained—”

  “Dignity,” Paine said.

  “Dignity.”

  “Then that’s all we live for,” Paine reflected. “If there’s any meaning in human life, then it’s there, in the dignity of a human being.”

  “I think so.”

  “I never realized that before; I began to feel it here, but I didn’t know until I spoke of it tonight. It’s true though; all through ten thousand years men have been corrupted by having their dignity taken from them. When my wife died and the neighbors poured in to look at her poor, tired body, the little, evil thrill of it the only excitement in their lives, each bringing a scrap of food for admission, I coul
d think, God help me, only of how comical it was. If we were made in the image of God, how rotten that image has become!”

  Another time, Jefferson was giving a small dinner for George Washington and he asked Paine to come. Randolph was to be there, too, and at first Paine refused; he was frightened; he valued his relationship with Jefferson too much, and he was afraid he would make a fool of himself in front of the three Virginians whose culture, quality, and wealth were almost beyond his imagination. He had heard of Mount Vernon, Washington living there like a great feudal baron, with packs of hunting dogs, strings of horses, countless black slaves, rivers of wine, the “quality” coming and going endlessly, a coach that had cost two thousand pounds; he had heard of the Randolphs; certain Quakers of Philadelphia never tired telling tales of these three godless agnostics, and Paine had little basis upon which to separate the true from the false. What meaning for him or for any common man could a rebellion have if their kind were at the bottom of it? Wasn’t it all a clever cover for their desire to be freed from the dictatorship of the British tobacco agents, and weren’t they, as all their class, ruthless enough to spill a hundred thousand quarts of blood to see their great plantations thrive?

  But at last he gave in to Jefferson’s urging, forswore himself to sullen silence, put on his best suit, his best wig, and came to the dinner. He was surprised at how eagerly they shook hands with him; they knew of him; they read the Pennsylvania Magazine, even Washington who, Paine had presumed, read nothing at all. Peyton Randolph, the eldest of the three, had an eager, inquiring air, as if he had looked forward to nothing so much as meeting Paine. Washington said little; he sat and listened with his chin on his hand when he wasn’t eating, his long face intent upon what was being said, his brow furrowed with a shade of annoyance now and again, perhaps most of it an impatience with his own lack of understanding. Jefferson took up the conversation and did most of the talking. Paine noticed that of the four, Washington drank the most and seemed least affected by what he drank.