Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  The “swine” grinned at him when he spoke of the revolutionary army. They pelted him with mud when he tried to tell them why a man should want to die for this little civilization on the fringe of the forest, and for the first time in many years he used his fists. He was deceptively powerful, and his big shoulders hid layers of leathery muscle. They respected him when he had laid a few of them on their backs.

  Henry Knox, the fat colonel of artillery who was in command of the camp, grinned appreciatively. “They understand that,” he said. He had been a bookseller once, had even done a little publishing on his own, and he considered Paine his own private gift from God, something to lessen the boredom. Talking about the fantastic success of Common Sense, he would keep Paine in his tent for hours, and having a good, solemn liking for the bottle, they were quietly and warmly drunk on many an evening. Knox was the last person in the world to be in command of this dirty, disorderly, mutinous camp, a fat, smiling young man of twenty-six, florid in complexion, talking constantly about his wife, and again and again pressing Paine for the story of the book’s sale. Did it sell more than two hundred thousand? That was the story.

  Paine didn’t know; he wasn’t sure and they had lost all track of printings. And then it had been printed everywhere without permission.

  “But, man, man, there was a fortune in it,” Knox said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “And you didn’t touch it. By God, that was magnificent!”

  Paine shrugged, and then Knox began to speculate upon the number of readers there must have been. Possibly everyone in the colonies who was literate. Possibly a million readers, one of three persons—but that was hardly possible. Yet it was enough to stagger the imagination.

  “And here?” Paine asked. “What do we do and where do we go?”

  Knox said he didn’t know; they were here and the British were across the river, and it seemed like it might be that way forever. It had been terrible at first, being beaten in every engagement, but now they were learning how to fight. Perhaps it didn’t look that way, the camp being what it was, but they were learning—

  That was only a few weeks before Fort Washington fell. The fort, standing on a bluff on the east bank of the Hudson, was supposedly impregnable. Greene thought so, and so did Knox; if Washington had his doubts, he kept them to himself, and it was only Charles Lee, commanding about five thousand men in Westchester, who said out and out that the fort could not be held. It couldn’t; the hills around it were taken, the defenders rolled back, flanked, cut off from retreat, the fort filled so full of fleeing continentals that it could not even fire a shot in its defense. Some three thousand men were taken, and Washington, watching the whole thing from a boat in the Hudson, saw what little hope he had left crumble and disappear.

  Paine met him again only a few days before the fort was taken, and the Virginian had said, almost desperately:

  “It’s good to have you with us here. They don’t know in Philadelphia—they think it’s a very simple matter to make a war and a revolution.”

  Paine thanked him.

  “Talk to the men,” Washington said. “Only talk to them and make them understand this thing.”

  Then the fort was lost and the end was in sight. Paine sat stolidly and watched young Knox weep out his rage and disappointment, but when he turned to the Englishman for sympathy, Paine, in one of his rare bitter moods, snapped:

  “You poor damn fool, did you expect nothing to happen? Did you expect them to give us America?”

  “No, but the whole garrison—”

  “And it will be more than three thousand men before we’re finished. Don’t be an idiot,” Paine said brutally. “Stop crying—is that all you’re good for, tears?”

  At Hackensack, the camp was dissolving; daily, there were more and more desertions. Paine went from man to man, pleaded, threatened, used his big fists; and they listened to him, because he wasn’t an officer, because he was as unkempt and as ragged as any of them, because he could say a few words that would set a man’s heart on fire. It was hard, and it was going to be harder; he admitted that, but they hadn’t looked for a picnic, or had they? They weren’t paid, well, neither was he, and he turned his pockets inside out to show them. Their shoes had holes in them, well, so had his. Then why? “I know what I’m doing,” he grinned. “I’m feathering my own nest.” How? Well, for one thing, he told them, the United States of America would be a good place to live in, comfortable, good for a working man. He knew; he had been a staymaker, cobbler, weaver, exciseman, down the whole line; for another, the enemy wasn’t going to forget what had been until now. “Give up, and you’ll pay the rest of your lives,” he told them. And once he wangled a keg of rum from the dwindling commissary and got drunk with them, the way they could understand, roaring, yelling drunk.

  “All right, all right, citizens,” he told them. “A little of this and a little of that. We’re just beginning.”

  Then the enemy crossed the Hudson, flanked them, and Greene had to take his garrison out of Fort Lee, double-time, a panic-stricken crowd running down the road to Hackensack, Washington leading them, Greene and old Israel Putnam whipping them along, more panic at Hackensack when they tried to reorganize with the mob, and then the whole rabble plodding out of Hackensack on the road to Newark, less than three thousand of them now; and they, with the five thousand stationed in Westchester under Lee, were all that was left of the twenty thousand continentals who had held New York. It rained and they dragged through the mud, whipped and miserable; they were starting a retreat that had no end in sight, and this was all that remained of the glorious revolution and the glorious army. In Newark they were jeered at by the Jersey citizens who were so sure they were seeing the last act of a miserable drama. They ran, fell, crawled, panted through the town, and scarcely were they out of one end than the British patrols entered the other.

  Rain changed to the winter’s first snow on the road to New Brunswick, and marching through the slow-drifting flakes, they were a column of sorry and forlorn ghosts, muskets and rusty bayonets, here and there a cocked hat, a bandage, a cannon or two trundling clumsily, no sound and no song and no cheering, the officers walking their horses with faces bent against the cold. The road was bordered with stone walls, mantled in white now; the fields were dead and flat and the houses Wore masks of shutters.

  Paine walked beside a boy whose name was Clyde Matton, and who came from Maine. Carrying his own gun and the boy’s, Paine had an arm around his thin shoulder. “The march is short,” Paine said, “when one minds the road and not the steps.”

  “I reckon it’s too long either way.”

  “There’ll be a warm fire tonight.”

  “Little comfort in that. I’m thinking of going home.”

  “Home’s a far way off. There’re few men here, but good men.”

  He walked by the carts of the wounded and told them stories. They found him a good story-teller; he could make things sound funny, and he was a fine mimic of accents. Already, he had picked up the vernacular of the various colonies, and he had a deadpan method of delivery, his heavy beaked nose inquiring for effect after each sentence. In spite of what he had gone through, he had never been healthier physically; his large, freckled face inspired confidence, and whether it was a cart mired in the muck or a man fainted from weariness, Paine’s big shoulders and slab-like hands were ready and willing. Before this, strength had meant nothing, the power of mules and work-horses and slaves, but now it was something that gave him a heady sort of happiness—as once, when remaining behind with Knox and Alexander Hamilton and a dozen others to hold a rear guard crossing with a gun, he had alone driven off a flanking attack of dragoons, wading among the horses and sabers and flailing his big musket around his head like a light cane, taking nothing in return but a slight cut over the eye and a powder burn on the cheek. Telling about it admiringly, young Hamilton said:

  “He’s filthy and slovenly enough when you come to that, but he’s the bravest man I eve
r saw, and he has the strength of a madman.”

  The bloodstains they left on the road where their bare feet dragged made him refuse Greene’s offer of boots; he wasn’t acting, but he was living the one life that was undeniably his own, this thing called revolution, learning a technique among this defeated, fleeing army, learning the one life he might live.

  At night, they made their fires when they could not march a step more, and it was Paine to do the cooking for a hundred men, Paine to calm a boy’s fear, Paine to read a man a letter from his wife and write one in return, Paine to sit with his strong hands clasped about his bent knees and slowly, simply explain what they were suffering for, the politics of an empire and a world, the struggles of mankind from the Romans to now, the new day of small men, not only in America but the world over.

  The officers left him alone. He had hardly anything to do with them now, and they, in turn, realized that a dirty, unshaven English staymaker was one of the few things that kept what was left of the American cause from dissolving into thin air.

  Washington was not the man Paine had met in Philadelphia, not the long, carefully groomed Virginia aristocrat, not the richest man in America and lord of Mt. Vernon, but haggard and skinny, the face drawn, the light gray eyes bloodshot, the buff and blue uniform, for all its launderings, spotted with dirt-stains and bloodstains. Washington was a man who said to Paine:

  “Whatever you can do—”

  “It’s little that I can do,” Paine nodded. “If you mean write something, it’s hard to tell a man who is suffering and giving that he must suffer more and give more.”

  “I don’t know you,” the Virginian said. “But there are so many things I don’t know now I thought I knew once. I don’t know how to put my faith in a staymaker, but I am doing it. I am glad to call you my friend, Paine, and I would be proud if you’d take my hand, not as the writer of Common Sense, but as one man to another.”

  They shook hands, Paine with tears in his eyes.

  “If you can write something,” Washington said, “not only for the army but for the whole country. We’re so near to the end—”

  Paine was thinking he would die gladly for this man, die or kneel on the ground he walked.

  Well, writing was what a writing man should do. With the drum held between his knees, with the top tilted to catch the wavering light of the fire, he scratched and scratched away, all the night through. The men gathered around him, men who knew Paine and loved him, men who had felt the strength of his arms, men who had slogged side by side with him. They read as he wrote, sometimes aloud in their stiff, nasal back-country accents:

  “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.…”

  They read:

  “If there be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace …”

  With bloodshot eyes, they read and spoke softly:

  “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and repulse it.…”

  “I thank God that I fear not,” they read, and others on the edge of the crowd begged him, “Read it, Tom.”

  “Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or theatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to bind me in all cases whatsoever to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain or by an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.…”

  Hard, cruel, vulgar words they understood, and like a harsh and angry roar, their voices came:

  “Read it!”

  9

  THE LONG WAR

  THE ARMY was across the Delaware, safe for the moment on the south bank, when Paine decided to go to Philadelphia with old Israel Putnam and publish the paper he had written. Come out of the worst crisis they had known yet, he called it that, Crisis, and both Washington and Greene agreed that it might help. Putnam, a tired, aging man was going to try to find volunteers, to quiet the city and keep order, but he didn’t put much faith in his mission. Jogging into the city with Paine, the two of them on moth-eaten nags, he muttered to the effect of its being over.

  “Well, it’s not over, if that’s what you mean,” Paine said.

  “Almost—” Putnam pointed out that he, Paine, was young; he, Putnam, was an old man; he had rheumatism; and he hated Philadelphia; he was a Yankee himself, and he hated the midlanders.

  “They’re like other folk. You won’t find much difference anywhere, plain people are plain people.”

  “Are they, the damn, dirty bastards?”

  Paine had had a letter from Roberdeau, a pleading, apologetic letter. Understanding took time, Roberdeau said. All before the campaign had been like a storm coming up, and no one believed it, and now the storm was here.

  Paine spoke more forthrightly than he should have; lashing into old Putnam, he said:

  “All of you officers are the same; nothing matters but a military victory, and as far as you are concerned the men you lead might as well be tin soldiers!”

  “Less than that.”

  “You old fool, haven’t we done enough in just being! Did you expect it to be over in a week?”

  Putnam glowered and closed up, and after that they rode on in silence. The snow-covered pike was bare and cold and lonely; everywhere in the Jersey and Pennsylvania counties now, houses were shuttered. It was a suspicious, surly land, and both men felt it. They were relieved to see the church spires of Philadelphia in the distance.

  This was a frightened city. He saw a house burning, and nobody moved to fight the flames, and as ominous as the devil a pall of smoke rolled eastward on the wind. Frightened and not the city of brotherly love—a shop window smashed, a printing press wrecked in the street, a cart of household goods overturned. People ran, slowed to a walk, and ran again, and on a street corner an itinerant Quaker preacher called out, “He who takes up the sword must perish by the sword!”

  And there were deserters everywhere spreading the news of what had happened on the long, sad march from New York to Trenton, how it was that the army had dissolved into nothing, and Washington, the blundering foxhunter, had hanged himself, surely, and Charles Lee was a prisoner of the British, taken in a bawdy house, and the soldiers were eating the leather of their shoes, and Greene had turned traitor and murdered George Washington, and Howe had Washington prisoner and the Virginian was going to lead a Tory army against his own people.

  There were sad people going away with all they owned piled high on rickety wagons: The enemy is here, don’t you know?

  And hard people with set faces who walked to their work with muskets in their hands: Let them come!

  And people who understood nothing of what was happening, when only yesterday it was peace.

  It was not the city Tom Paine had left. The world goes on, and then suddenly something happens, and then never again is there peace and quiet. The thieves and cutthroats become bold, for they are the first to sense that an era has come to an end, and that never
again will things be the same.

  Bell would not print what Paine had written. “Mon, mon, do ye think me mad?” He was dismantling his presses. “When Congress goes, I go,” he said.

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Aye, mon, and no’ ashamed of it.”

  Paine was patient, a different man, Bell realized, a bulking, ragged man with a musket slung over his shoulder, but patient and explaining:

  “You are wrong, Bell, the British will not take the city, and there are some things that have to be done, whether they take it or not. You see, this has to be printed; I call it The Crisis. We’re in the first crisis, and we’re going through it.” Wheedling, “You and I can set it in one night.”

  “No!”

  “God damn you, Bell, you made a fortune out of Common Sense. You’re going to print this if I have to hold a bayonet at your throat!”

  “No!”

  For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes, and then Paine whispered, “God damn you,” and turned away.

  Paine sold it to the Pennsylvania Journal, to an editor who told him, grimly smiling, that Congress had already left for Baltimore.

  “Courage,” the editor smiled, “is a nebulous conception. Of course, we must preserve the government.”

  Paine apologized for asking for money. He hadn’t written this thing for money, just as he hadn’t written Common Sense for money; but when a man’s stomach is empty a few shillings become as necessary as breathing.

  “Philadelphia is worse than the army,” Paine explained. “The army is freezing and starving, but there’s always a crust of bread. But you don’t last long in the city without a shilling in your pocket.”

  The editor nodded, and wondered whether the army could use him. He was fed up with the city.

  “Don’t go away,” Paine said somberly. “There are few enough left who dare to print what has to be printed.”