by Paul Collins
Reader, just for the moment, let us assume that as you hold this book open with one hand, you are holding a piece of ivory in the other. It is two feet long, and the thickness of a man's thumb. Now, if you were to make this piece of ivory descend with great force upon the head of your closest neighbor, they would inform you that it is an item possessing great hardness. Yet, were you to rest this ivory rod between two chairs, and then sit upon it, you would find it possessed a surprising flexibility. One might have assumed that as this item is hard, it was therefore not flexible. Its hardness, although not actually opposed to flexibility, seems incompatible at first glance. This is what second glances are for: an assertion demands proof through actual observation, rather than mere assumptions.
Writing in his book Elements of Logick in 1748, the Scottish logician William Duncan explains:
Ivory for instance is hard and elastic; this we know by experience, and indeed by that alone. For being altogether strangers to the true nature both of elasticity and hardness, we cannot by the bare contemplation of our ideas determine, how far the one necessarily implies the other, or whether there may be a repugnance between them. But when we observe them to exist both in the same object, we are then assured from experience, that they are not incompatible.
Elements of Logick was the boning knife of the Scottish Enlightenment: it sliced argumentation clean of bloated classical artifice, tearing away its Latinate fat to reveal a Greek skeleton of Euclidian logic. Duncan wielded self-evident propositions and a geometrical progression of proofs and assertions to build arguments: his was the elevation of mathematical logic to rhetoric. Elements of Logick influenced revolutionary intellectuals and scientists alike—and when you realize that to be the former was also often to be the latter, you begin to understand the era of Franklin and Paine. When their fellow rationalist Jefferson fatefully claimed that "we hold these truths to be self-evident," he was laying out the destiny of his continent as a mathematical statement.
But then there is that problem with our ivory rod. Certain truths are not self-evident: that is why they must be examined and spelled out. They are not common sense. And that is why Common Sense itself, weirdly enough, is not common sense at all. This strange little book, so often cited as a model of plainspoken clarity, is something altogether more subtle. Only its language is straightforward: its form and aims are not. Common Sense is in fact at least three separate arguments, none of which many Americans in 1776 would have been inclined to entirely agree with. Yet Paine makes one argument imperceptibly slide into the next, like the telescoping segments of a collapsible spyglass. By the time you realize what he's doing, he's already folded you up and put you in his pocket.
Paine begins with his most outrageous implication: all kings are illegitimate. He does this by denying that most precious possession of monarchs, their noble bloodlines. "Could we take off the dark covering of antiquity," Common Sense dryly notes, "and trace them to their first rise . . . we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang." Granted, a loyal subject may say, perhaps that's true; in fact, it has to be true for Shakespeare's history plays to work. But an unsavory past does not always dictate reform in the present. It would not be very practical. The great benefit of kings in the present, one might think, is that no matter how compromised the monarchy's origins are, they have become a safe and predictable form of government.
Except that they are not. "The whole history of England disowns the fact," Paine snaps. 'Thirty kings and two minors have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the [Norman] conquest, in which time there have been (including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions."
Very well. But eventually the present king and prime minister will both die or lose their party's confidence. The taxes for war debts against France will fade. A hopeful reader in 1776 might still believe that America's more or less peaceful relation to Britain would return. What is curious for an American to realize today is that this indeed might have happened, as it did in Canada. That an entire section of Common Sense is dedicated to arguing against making peace-"reconciliation now is a dangerous doctrine"-shows that peace was still thought a very real competing possibility in 1776. What made reconciliation a dangerous answer, to Paine, is that its proponents had asked all the wrong questions. In Common Sense, the burden of proof is not upon Americans to prove why they should be independent, but upon the British to prove why America should stay dependent. Britain only used America to its own purposes, Paine argued: why shouldn't Americans determine whether Britain served them any purpose? "Dependence on Great Britain tends to directly involve this continent in European wars and quarrels . . ." he concluded. "America goes to ruin, because of her connection with Britain."
While a great many Americans were unhappy with King George, not many of them had really thought of being unhappy with all kings. Colonists wanted power over their own affairs, but were not overly picky about what form that power should take. Perhaps they would have their own king, or become a British protectorate; maybe they'd simply agitate until they got their own members of Parliament. But make that seemingly outrageous assertion "all kings are illegitimate" and this anchors your readers in a way that makes subsequent statements sound comparatively pragmatic: such as, say, how to raise up a navy against the most powerful country in the world. By the end of the pamphlet Paine has his green eyeshades on and his red pencil out to price various configurations of warships for Colonists-and suddenly the prospect of revolution is looking alarmingly practical, if not downright inevitable. Which, in retrospect, we probably imagine it was.
We think of Common Sense as being the most withering attack ever upon that favorite bogeyman of Americans, mad old King George. Yet when you read it closely, you find this remarkable fact: not once is the name George III uttered. What Paine wrote was an attack on all kings, all illegitimate authority, on all the great and petty brutes of the world. Common Sense is a pair of rhetorical bolt cutters, and it will neatly snap in half anything-the cant of kings, priests, or next-door neighbors—that is placed between its blades. It is a declaration of independence, a new kind of argument that denies all precedence by smacking the rulebook out of an opponent's hands and ignoring every previous thing thought or said in their favor. Paine does not cite classical authors, or Tory opponents, or the constitutional theories of Bolingbroke; he is not playing at polite debate. He does not want your tradition: he wants your reason. The scepter of authority is no more exalted to him than the logician's rod of ivory, and when proof is lacking we may slap it aside. What Paine offered America was nothing less than rebirth, independence from the dead weight of the past: his epitaph directs you to an admonition from the dead to the living.
"We have it in our power," he wrote, 'Yo begin the world again."
And this is where it ends.
Stand clear of the . . . Doors thud shut on the number 2 express and it roars out toward Brooklyn as I make my way through the turnstile and up into a canyon of buildings. Wall Street at night always feels strangely desolate, as any financial district is in its off hours, I suppose: nobody wants to stay here unless they have to. It's hard to imagine, looking up at the slumbering mass of law and investment firms, that people used to live around here. Carver's house was just a few blocks from here, as was the dreary Partition Street boardinghouse where Paine finally stopped writing-it's called Fulton Street now. And his room in Jarvis's studio was a couple of blocks in the other direction, looking directly across the street into what was once the World Trade Center.
I stop at the corner of Wall and Water streets, by the endless print churn of a Kinko's shop: this is where the newspaper instructed me to go. I fish the New-York Herald out from my backpack, its pages browned by the passage of two centuries. It flutters slightly in the breeze off the looming buildings:
FOR SALE, at public auction, at the Tontine Coffee House in the city of New-York . . . an excellent FARM, situated in the town of New Rochelle, i
n the county of Westchester, and late the property of Thomas Paine, dec. containing about 84 acres . . . The terms of sale are one half cash; the remainder to be secured by mortgage on the premises An indisputable title will be given to the purchasers by the Executors of Mr. Paine.
Granted, the auction gets far less space than an entire column on the same page devoted to the felicities of Dr. Robertson's Vegetable Nervous Cordial, but it is more than most New York papers bothered to say about Paine himself when he died. Most had little to say except to tartly note that he had done "some good and much harm." The man they had no use for; his plot of dirt upstate, at least, was worth something. A buyer coming here to the coffeehouse that afternoon would have found the place a bustle of transactions, as it always was: the Tontine was the precursor to the Stock Exchange, and in its three floors of cigar smoke and bidding, you could make political deals, pick up mail off-loaded from newly arrived London ships, and buy entire cargos of pelts or lumber. But if you bid in that auction for the property of the late Thomas Paine, you got just a little more than you'd bargained for—something they had rather conveniently forgotten to mention in the ad. For along with his land, you also got . . . Thomas Paine.
It was a sad tale to relate. After Jarvis made one last pilgrimage to his friend's deathbed, this time to make a plaster death mask of Paine, he bitterly drew a caricature of Manhattan's ministers stomping on the dead body while a Quaker turns his back and walks away with a shovel, muttering, "I'll not bury thee." The young men who had once shunned Benjamin Lay were now old men who turned their backs on Thomas Paine. But a quietly defiant Willet Hicks, at least, had come to Paine's aid. Hicks rode with the corpse as it was hauled up to the farm in New Rochelle; and there, not far from Paine's cottage, he officiated at a burial in the unconsecrated corner of a field.
A taxi passes me with a familiar image affixed to its roof-an ad with Ben Franklin's face staring out from a hundred-dollar bill. The old mentor, staring past the vanished remains of his wayward protege.
There were twenty thousand mourners at Franklin's funeral. Tom Paine's had six. And while Franklin's grave became a place of pilgrimage, Paine's attracted a different sort of attention. Pious locals in New Rochelle would make sure to pelt his headstone with rocks whenever they passed: others kicked at the leaning stone, or chipped off pieces as souvenirs. It all became too much for Paine's old neighbor Charity Badeau, who ran a tavern across the street; exasperated by the desecrations, she saved the few remaining pieces of the stone by mortaring them into the wall of her establishment. Even these still had small nuggets pried out of them. Few gave much thought to the dead fellow now buried in an unmarked grave in the weeds, save for the local drunks idly flaking chips off Mrs. Badeau's wall with their penknives. Years passed: his memory faded.
But in the dead of night in October 1819, Badeau's son Albert thought he heard something outside their tavern. He peered out his window and into the darkness. It was hard to make out, but across the road there were-one, two, three men. AU gathered around where the gravestone used to be. Albert squinted harder. It looked like they were . . .
Digging.
Committed to the Ground
THE MORNING OF November 21,1819, brought a mist off the Mersey and swirling over Liverpool piers, fogging the early morning's frenetic haulage off merchant vessels: bales of cotton and tobacco from Georgia, sacks of sugar from Haiti, crates of pepper and tea from Bombay-men sweating under their loads; horses stumbling; commands punctuated by tubercular coughs of city air fouled with coal. Towering above it all at the riverside was the newly built Customs House, a commanding Regency pile of porticos and pillars capped by a mighty dome. It was there to put arriving passengers in awe of the nation's mercantile might, and in its grand yard the excise officers awaited to put them in awe of government regulations as well.
The cargo of the Hercules was next on their slate: it had been docked for a couple of days now, and its waiting crates were pried open and bills of lading scrutinized. But if there came to be a strange pause in the proceedings, customs officials could be forgiven for any hesitancy about the next passenger in line. "William Cobbett," read the name on the passenger manifest.
A middle-aged man, slightly portly and clearly brooking no nonsense, stood before them. The yard filled with a crowd eagerly craning inward to gape-they had, upon the ship's docking on Monday, cheered Cobbett from the dock and through the streets of Liverpool, all the way to the inn where he was lodging. Now they watched as his numerous trunkloads of heavy luggage were examined by the officers. Clothes, personal effects, books, papers . . . yes, yes. Plant cuttings? Well, that was to be expected, as the fellow was also a noted author on horticultural matters. But then the officers arrived at a wooden box. The passenger watched gravely and closely as the excisemen pried it open and reached inside. And then, from within its depths, the crowd saw an object emerge into the cold winter light.
A human skull.
Cobbett gazed upon it, and then upon his inquisitors.
"There, gentlemen," he announced, "are the mortal remains of the immortal Thomas Paine."
This place is utterly dead. Brit Rail's diesel rattle builds up and shudders the train out of Wanborough Station, leaving me to regard an increasingly silent landscape of trees, hedges, and English gardens. Wanborough's not much of a station. In fact, I'm the only person here at all. The last ticket-window clerk left in 1987, and now the doors to the station house are locked: peering in through a gap in its blinds, I can see that its two doleful rooms are emptied out and covered with dust, shredded wires dangling grimly out of the walls. OFFICE TO LET, announces a sign.
If you lay down right here on the platform and took a nap, it might be a very long while before anyone noticed you. This part of Surrey, just past an isolating ridge known as the Hog's Back, has some of the quietest and most thickly forested expanses in all of Southern England. And yet modest country places like these can hide a great deal: Saxons left barrows here, and Romans dumped sacks of gold coins in the ground. During the war, an engineer died when a Luffwaffe pilot bombed this stretch of the railroad tracks, but he was not the first to go; two other men were killed here in 1891, building a little railway station that there was no real need for in the first place. The tenant of nearby Wanborough Manor, as it happens, was the private secretary of Prime Minister Gladstone, and the cabinet thought it'd be jolly convenient to put a station near his house. And so it is that we are outlasted by our impulsive acts: the secretary is gone, but his station and its ghosts remain.
Though the station is named after the local manor, the train actually serves the tiny hamlet of Normandy. It's a quiet and ancient place, quite possibly one of the smallest villages in Britain to still have a working rail stop. I make my way up Glazier's Lane past inoffensive new brick bungalows-one, inevitably, is called Wisteria-all built atop parish plots that once housed inoffensive old stone cottages. In between them, I can see ancient farmlands peeping through. Across these fields is an incongruously tall brick smokestack attached, as best I can tell, to absolutely nothing at all. But all else here is cozily domestic; the road crookedly leads onward past an intersection with the A323, past Normandy Common and a little pub, toward the old neighborhood known by the quaint name of Christmas Pie.
No Pie for me, thanks: I tramp onward down the A323, letting Vauxhalls whiz past me as I walk on the verge. Odd little local businesses, washed up like flotsam from faraway towns, appear at irregular intervals along the road. A karaoke and PA shop, which surely must be doing its business by mail from this location. A glazier, inexplicably not based back on Glazier's Lane, advertises itself with the rather dispiriting motto "Probably the Best Window Installers in Your Area." Soon even these curiously misplaced shops disappear, and the once-hidden farmland stretches out on both sides. The side of the road becomes a ditch, filled with brackish water and hubcaps; growing in and around it are a wild profusion of winter-wilted daffodils and tulip stalks awaiting the return of spring, and wildly capillary
trees; for the trees here are, for lack of a better word, very branchy. And then for long stretches come the hedges.
Ah, the hedgerows: I am in England. It's hard to imagine a time when the rural landscape was not thus. Hedged-in country lanes are so utterly English, indeed so utterly this latitude of England. Up northward, in the rough tracts of Scotland and the Yorkshire dales, the fields are bounded with piled stone walls and stiles; but here in Surrey the road is hemmed in by dense greenery. I walk slowly along the verge, squinting my eyes at one stretch of the endless miles of twisting and gnarled foliage, peering in at the interlocking branches and trying to count. One . . . two? Two species here, I think. Hawthorn, of course-there is always hawthorn in these hedges-but there also looks to be some blackthorn growing in there.
There's an old rule of thumb for dating hedges, commonly known as Hooper's Rule. It goes like this:
Age of the hedge= [(No. of species per 30yards) x 110] +30
For two species, then, that works out to about 250 years. So take away the cars, take away the glazier's shop and the karaoke, take away the cat's-eyes in the road—take away the road itself. And imagine a gentleman walking along this muddy lane those two centuries ago, back when these old hedges were still young. In his arms, he bears a box of bones.
William Cobbett was born into the life of a farmer's son: a world that in the 1760s was small and circumscribed, with age-old tasks to keep the boy busy. "I do not remember the time when I did not earn my living," he later mused. "My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the peas. When I trudged afield, with my wooden bottle and my satchel over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and, at the close of day, to reach home was a task of infinite labour."
His childhood in Surrey was one of relentless work and simple pleasures: for amusement, he and his brothers would shove each other down a steep slope, "rolling down the hill like a barrel or a log of wood" and laughing uncontrollably as they got dirty and torn up. He had little formal schooling, and for the rest of his life considered that hiiside-where he and his brothers bled in and breathed in the dirt, where he covered himself in it and picked it out of his mouth and nose-as his schooling. "It is impossible to say how much I owe to that sandhill," he later claimed. Upon hearing that the king kept magnificent gardens in Kew, he eagerly ran away at the age of eleven with nothing but thirteen half-pence in his pocket. From Kew, Cobbett eventually drifted onward into a miserable apprenticeship in a London law office, then back to his native farmland, and finally into a marines enlistment that sent him to the New World just as the Revolution ended.