Citizen Tom Paine (12 page)

He kept his lips tight about it, and when Aitken came to him and said he might have a hint as to who the assailants were, Paine simply shook his head.

“It doesn't matter. The few pages they tore up I know by heart.”

“But you, man, you!”

“I'll live,” Paine said briefly.

The Reverend Jared Heath of the Society of Friends put it to Paine in a different fashion.

Heath, a small, moist-eyed man, said to Paine with utter sincerity, “Thomas, thee know not what thee do.”

“And exactly what am I doing that I don't know?” Paine demanded.

“Thee are setting brother against brother and father against son and workman against employer with this writing of independence. Who, Thomas, speaks for independence? Thee should know that not the good people, not the considerate, not the gentle, but the discontented, those who make mock of God, the foreigners among us. Thee are one of us, yet thee write to plunge us into bloodshed.”

“I am one of many things,” Paine said wearily, not wanting to hurt this little man who evoked memories of his father, his uncles, of the old meeting house at Thetford.

“Come to us and pray and thee will see light.”

The summer past, the leaves turning red and brown and yellow as they rustled over the cobbled streets of Philadelphia, the cold clean winds blowing from the northwest, Paine still scraped at his paper. The thing was done or never done; he didn't know. He had written a little book to make men see the thing clearly, and it asked for independence. With deliberate hatred, he had torn apart the whole conception of monarchy. He had pointed out how long man had been nailed to the cross, and in words a farmer could understand begged for a good new world in this good new land. He had even tried his hand at a form of government. But always he harped on a single fact, that regardless of the pain, the torment, and the bloodshed, here must be a new and independent country.

He wrote on the first page, as if purging himself, “Common Sense, written by an Englishman.”

And then it was done, a heap of scribbled-over paper. No one would read it and probably no one would print it, but it was for the doing that Paine worked.

He was tired and listless, not left even with a desire to be drunk. Fascinated by the cool change of season, he wandered lazily through the narrow streets of Old Philadelphia, sniffing the winds that blew from the wide and grave and mysterious west. Never in England came such a change of season, sharp and clean, the air washing over a whole continent to thunder at the tidewater wanderers fled from the old world.

He discovered, so short was the memory of men, even for a ribald jest, that few now remembered he was Common Sense, and fewer poked fun at him. He was left alone, and often he said to himself that was just as well.

He let Aitken read his finished manuscript; no animosity was left between them, and Aitken, glasses perched on his nose, followed the scrawl carefully and considerately. Finally he said, “It's no' a bad thing, Thomas, but, my lad, it's muckle dangerous.”

“If anyone reads it,” Paine said.

“I will no' publish it, but why na' take it to Bobby Bell, who's a fool for such matters.”

“If you think so,” Paine nodded.

Bell was a Scotsman too, hatchet-faced, with ink-grimed hands. He said a good morning to Paine, and then took the manuscript, leaned against his counter and began to read. Paine dropped to a chair, closed his eyes, dozed a little, opened his eyes to see that the Scotsman had started over at the front page. His face never moved, never changed expression as he went through the manuscript again. Then he folded it carefully, laid it down on the counter, and placed a paperweight on it to hold it in place.

“You don't want it,” Paine said.

“No-o—”

Paine began to rise but the Scotsman said, “Be in no hurry. I canna guarantee a profit, but I will set type and make a book of it. A man canna say will sell or will no' sell, but I lean to standing up to what's mine. They're good, clear sentiments.”

“I don't want any money,” Paine said. “I wrote this because I had to, that's all. If you make money, you can have it; I don't want it.”

“I have no argument with a man who desires to throw a penny in my lap.”

“Then you'll print it.”

“That I will,” Bell said somberly.

And then Paine rose and left the shop as casually as he had entered.

7

COMMON SENSE

D
R. BENJAMIN RUSH
, a young Philadelphia physician who had some time since decided that more than physical ills ailed mankind, told Ben Franklin how Bell had cooled toward the idea of Paine's book. “I think he was afraid,” Rush said. “I don't blame him. Like a hundred thousand others, he doesn't know on what side his bread is buttered; he has other things to think about, all men have, I suppose.

“But, God, the more I think of it, the more I wonder how those farmers at Lexington had the guts to stand up to it.”

“Did you read the book?” Franklin asked.

“Yes.”

“And did you like it?”

“It's not something a man likes or dislikes. Neither is gunpowder, nor bleeding.”

“Of course, you got Bell to go ahead?” Franklin said quietly.

“Was that wrong? He owes me, and I suppose I put my finger on him where it hurt a little.”

“Things are not right and wrong any more,” Franklin reflected, almost sadly. “We go ahead, and that's all.”

“Of course, they're right and wrong!”

“Of course,” Franklin shrugged. “It was right for kings to rule the world for a thousand years. It was right for little people to suffer and die. It was so right for men to be slaves that there was never a need for chains.” He added, after a moment's hesitation, “I'm sorry I am an old man. I would like to see—”

“If you want to read the book,” Rush said, “it will be off the presses in a few days. You've probably seen parts of it in manuscript. That man Paine certainly isn't reticent.”

“Bring me a copy,” Franklin nodded, reflecting that he had had a hand in opening Pandora's box, almost boyishly eager to see what Paine, who would shake the world apart, had to say.

From the press and just sewn together, it still smelled of ink and smudged as Paine held it in his hands, a thin book called “Common Sense, written by an Englishman,” with big block letters on the cover, sticky as Paine opened it.

“Done,” Bell said.

Paine told him, “I don't want you to suffer for this,” and Bell shrugged. “I'll want to buy a few copies,” said Paine.

Bell nodded.

“To show them to my friends.”

“Ye may.”

“You'll give it to me a little cheaper than the regular price?” Paine remarked, not able to keep a note of anxiety out of his voice, his hand in his pocket holding all the money he had in the world.

“I may.”

“It makes a pretty book,” said Paine.

Consigned to Baltimore by stage, the package had neither the sender's name nor the contents marked on it, only the destination, the shop of Marcus Leed, a small bookseller. But Bell, to purchase the driver's silence, had given him a dozen copies to sell himself at two shillings to whoever would buy. In the coach, the passengers took one to share among them and while away the hours with—fat, bespectacled Parson Amos Culwoodie, Methodist free preacher, reading sonorously:

“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy.”—The parson had always felt as much.—“It first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required—” Jacob Stutz, the miller, sitting alongside the parson, knew that if man doesn't live by bread alone, bread at least is as necessary as anything else, and now wondered what king on earth could do a simple grading of flour.

A long journey and a noisy one. The parson reaffirmed his position as God's right hand man when he read, “How came the king by a power the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check?”

“How indeed?” Mrs. Roderick Clewes asked.

The parson took off his hat in deference to a lady. “There is no divine right in man,” he stated decisively.

“None?”

“None, I tell you, madam. For a minister, a call perhaps, an inspiration, an unfolding of the darkness, a nearness to God. But divine right—that, madam, I assure you, is dispensed by Satan.”

In the old Brackmeyer Coffee House by Dr. Rush's arrangement were met David Rittenhouse, James Cannon, Christopher Marshall, Ludwig Rees, and Amberton St. Allen, a strange company of the high and the low, united by a desperate feeling that now there was no turning back. It gave them a feeling of romance, a feeling of living high and swiftly and gloriously, to know that when the redcoats came to Philadelphia they would be among the first hanged. Withal, theirs was an intellectual approach, and their god was Ben Franklin, not the Adams cousins. When Rush told them he had called them together to read a pamphlet, they nodded, called for drinks, and set themselves to listen.

“Never mind who wrote this,” Rush said, and then he read slowly and meticulously for almost three hours, stopping now and then to answer a brief question, but toward the latter part of his reading holding his listeners in a rapt silence.

“It's called
Common Sense
,” he said when he had finished.

“Of course, it's Paine's thing,” Rittenhouse nodded.

“That's right.”

“If this be treason—” someone paraphrased.

“You don't realize—it's so damned insidious.”

“How much?”

“Two shillings.”

“Well, it ought to be less.”

“You think people will buy it?”

“Is there anyone who won't? The man's a devil and a genius.”

“No, he's a peasant. Have you ever seen his hands, like slabs of beef. He's a peasant, and that's why he understands us, because we're a nation of peasants and shopkeepers and mechanics. He comes here a year ago and he knows what's in our guts. He's not writing for you and me, but for the man at the plow and the bench, and, God, how he flatters them, crawls inside of them, tickles them, seduces them, talks their own language, says to them: Isn't this reasonable? Isn't this common sense? Why haven't you done this long ago? Bathe the world in the blood of tyrants! You and I and all the rest, why are we slaves when we can be free? Is he Christ or the devil? I don't know. I know, after hearing that thing read, there will be no peace for a long time.”

“For how long?”

“Not ten years—maybe a hundred, two hundred. Maybe never—I don't know if men were made to be slaves or free.”

Abraham Marah was a trader with the Indians, a lonely man, a strong man but black-eyed and black-visaged. His name when he came to the country as a little boy had been Abraham ben Asher, but they called him Marah because he was bitter, and as he came of age and lived more and more in the dark forests he called himself Abraham Marah, after the new fashion. He was a Jew, but at the synagogue he was known as a rebel. “I'm a free man,” he would say, “and God has done nothing for me.”

But he wasn't slow with money when they asked for contributions. As they said, What use had he for money? With no home, no wife, no possessions but the pack on his back and his long Pennsylvania squirrel gun, he would roam on for months at a time. He knew the Indians—the Shawnee, the Miami, the Wyandot, and the Huron—and they knew him. Fur hunters they all were, and he could come back from six months in the dark forest with a fortune in pelts on his donkeys. Now, starting out again, he came to Bell and bought twenty copies of Paine's book.

“Why, Abraham?” Bell asked him.

“Because I read it, because where I go, others think twice, and then in the end stay home.”

He brought the first copy to Fort Pitt. John Neville and his Virginia militia had already taken the post, and now they were sitting around, drinking more than was good for them, wondering whether to go home, wondering why they had taken up guns when there was neither purpose nor reason nor goal. They were long, hard men in dirty hunting shirts, and many of them had not deciphered a written word these ten years past. But, as Lieutenant Cap Heady said, when a Jew gives away something, there's a reason. Heady read out loud in the light of a campfire:

“In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which, in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshiped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

It was the sort of thing the Virginians enjoyed hearing. “Go on,” they told Heady.

Marah's way was long and rambling. A copy stayed in a Kentucky stockade, another in an Ohio stockade, one in a lake cabin with the promise to pass it on and on. Three copies were saved for the French Canadians, the voyageurs whom Marah loved better than all other Americans, and one copy was unfolded, page by page, in an Iroquois longhouse as Marah painfully translated
Common Sense
into the Indian tongue.

General George Washington of Virginia was a troubled man; come up from his Mount Vernon, from his beloved Virginia, his broad and stately Potomac, from all the good, earthy things of his life, the lush fields, the fruit trees, the many bottles of good wine, he was now bogged down outside of Boston, in command of several thousand sprawling, lazy, totally undisciplined New England Yankees. The war, for all apparent purposes, had come to a halt; but the doubts of intelligent men, who had little idea of what it all meant or where it was taking them, went on. For Washington, who had come into this without any clear idea of means or end, but simply with a fierce love of the land he tilled, a decent respect for the dignity of himself and his friends, and a hatred of the English method of conducting the tobacco business, doubt mounted steadily and surely. The word “independence” was too frequently spoken; it had a quality of terror, burn, pillage, and kill—remake the world! Washington loved the world he lived in; the earth was good, and better were the fruits of the earth. But to remake this good-enough world into some uncertain horror of the future—