Citizen Tom Paine (21 page)

“I want you to stay with me,” Greene told him one evening. “Tom, I need you. I want you to take a major's commission.”

Paine shook his head.

“But why? I don't speak of rewards, that's a long time off, but where is the virtue in being nothing, in not drawing a shilling's pay, in knowing that if you're captured, you'll be hanged an hour later?”

“I'm not a soldier,” Paine said.

“Are any of us?”

“This is your war to fight, Nathanael, and mine to understand. I am not even an American, and where is the end for me? You'll be free, but I'll have my chains—”

“I don't understand that.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” Paine said uneasily, and then smiled a bit as he reminded Greene that he was still the secretary for the Office of Foreign Affairs.

As they approached Valley Forge, Paine came down with an attack of dysentery. Colonel Joseph Kirkbride, whom Paine had first met at Fort Lee, was due for a leave, and asked whether the other wouldn't share it with him.

“You can stand a rest,” he told him.

Paine, who could barely stagger along by now, agreed. Greene provided the horses, gripped Paine's hand, and begged him to come back again.

“I'll come back,” Paine smiled. “A bad penny turns up, doesn't it?”

Kirkbride lived in Bordentown, in a comfortable frame house, hearths five feet wide, a feather bed at night, a steaming bath in the kitchen, and, best of all, books. He had Swift, Defoe, Shakespeare, Addison, Pope, Clairmont, the vulgar little novels of Dreed. Paine was sick and weak and tired, and he let go of reality, curled in front of the fire and wandered with Lemuel Gulliver, prodded the amorous filth of Gin Row with Muckey Dray, recaptured Defoe's England, dreamed, whispered parts from
Hamlet
and
Lear
, ate and slept. They had few visitors, and both men wanted to be left alone, to forget for a while. They drank a good deal, not to drunkenness, but to the warm, sleepy contentment of satisfied animals. They talked little; they looked out of the windows and watched the snow fall, the drifts pile up, always with the comfort that they could turn around and see the flame roar in the hearth.

In that way, two weeks passed before Paine rose one morning and announced, as if the thought had only just occurred to him:

“I'm going back.”

Riding along a frozen road where his horse's hoofs drummed like musket shots each time they bit through the crust of ice, Paine saw a blur in the meadow beside him, and going over knelt beside a man frozen stiff and dead, musket beside him and face turned up to the sky—a deserter but a continental, a life gone and cold loneliness in a lonely land.

That was the way it was and had ever been, winter and the land against them, closed doors and closed shutters, no different in Pennsylvania than it had been in Jersey.

At night he crouched close to a small fire; a step could mean death and he kept his musket beside him; he warmed his hands; he lay in his blanket and looked up at the cold winter sky. It was not safe to ask one's way nor to declare one's party. He was looking for a place called the Valley Forge, and only one man whom he spoke to had anything to say about it, “A sad spot, mind me.”

He stayed one blessed night in a Quaker household, a big, square man, soft-spoken, and a woman whose smile was innocent as a child's, and trying to thank them and tell them who he was, received from the man, “Nay, we know thee not, but as a stranger cold and hungry. And if thee are one of them, keep thee council.”

“You don't like the continentals?”

“We love man, but hate bloodshed, murder, and suffering.”

“And is it murder to fight for freedom?”

“Thee will find freedom a thousandfold more within thee.”

Leaving, Paine said, “The road to the encampment?”

“The Valley Forge?”

“Yes.”

“Thee will find it. God has chosen a place of perdition on earth. Look thee in the sky, and where the devil stands, they be.”

This was the Valley Forge. When he came, it was night, and a sentry, muffled in a blanket, barred his path. There was a bridge across the Schuylkill and a pink sky over the snowy hills. There were dugouts, lines of them back and forth like dirty lace, half dirt holes, half log. On a frozen parade ground, a flag waved. Fires burned, and dark figures moved in front of the flames. The hills jutted like bare muscles, and the leafless trees swayed in the wind.

“I am Paine,” he told the sentry, and the man coughed, laughed, showed his yellow teeth at the feeble pun.

“So we all are, citizen.”

“Tom Paine.”

The man sought in his memory, found a reminder, and shook his head. “Common Sense?”

“Yes. Where's the general?”

“Yonder—” The man had lost interest, huddled back in his blanket.

“Yonder” brought him past dugouts, an artillery emplacement, a log hospital where the wounded groaned, sang and screamed, and other sentries to whom he gave the same answer:

“Paine.”

“Go on.”

He had walked a mile through the encampment, along the river with the hills over him and to his left, when he saw in the dusk the fieldstone house that was Washington's headquarters. There was a drift of smoke from the chimney, a light in the windows, a sentry in front and a sentry in back. They let him in. Hamilton, a thin, hollow-eyed boy, years older than when Paine had last seen him, stood in the vestibule, recognized the onetime staymaker of Thetford, and smiled and nodded.

“Welcome.”

Paine blew on his hands and tried to smile.

“You like our little place?” Hamilton asked.

There was something in his tone that made Paine ask, uncertainly, “Is it worse than what I've seen?”

“That depends on how much you have seen.”

“I walked through from the bridge.”

“Then the best is yet to unfold,” Hamilton said bitterly. “You must go to the dugouts, Paine—you must go and talk to them, and probably they will cut your throat. Do you think you have seen them at their worst—but we are breeding a new brand of beast here. Why don't you ask why?”

“I know why,” Paine nodded.

“Do you—but you worked for that swinish Congress of ours. Do they know that we're starving, naked, dying of hunger and disease and cold, rotting—rotting, I tell you, Paine!”

Going up to him, Paine took him by his jacket and said quietly, “Get hold of yourself. I don't even know where Congress is. Get hold of yourself.”

Hamilton giggled and swallowed. “Sorry.” He giggled again. “Go in there—he's in there.”

“Don't be a fool.”

“Sorry,” Hamilton said.

Washington rose as Paine entered the room, peering for a moment to identify the stranger, and then smiling and holding out his hand. He looked older, Paine noticed; war was making old men of this young and desperate group; thinner, too, and strangely innocent as he was now, wigless, in a dressing gown with an ancient cap on his head, his gray eyes larger than Paine had ever imagined them to be. He was genuinely glad to see Paine, begged him to sit down and take off his coat, and then, in a very few words, described the tense and terrible situation at the encampment, the lack of food and clothing, the alarming increase in venereal disease, due to the abundance of women who lived with the men, some of them camp-followers, some of them wives, the daily desertions, the shortage of ammunition, the increasing anger even among the most loyal at the fact that they had not been paid for months.

“All that,” Washington said softly. “I tell you it is worse than last year, and you remember that. Unless the country helps, we will break, I can tell you that, Paine. I can tell no one else, but, Paine, we are close to the finish—you must know. Not through the enemy, but ourselves, and then the revolution will go like a bad dream.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go to Congress and plead. Go to the country and wake them up. Make them understand—tell them!”

“I want to stay here.”

“Don't stay here, Paine. Here it is hell, and I don't think even you can help us. Go to Congress, and somehow we will last out this winter—I can't think of the next. Somehow, we will endure.”

10

REVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

H
E FOUND
the Congress at York, and curiously enough he was welcomed. A dinner was given for him, and there were Rush, Abington, the Adams cousins, Lee, Hemingway, and others. The guest of honor was Tom Paine, shaven and with a new jacket and shoes. “What he has seen and suffered,” Hemingway said, “should be an inspiration for all of us.” Well-fed, honest men they were; claret was the drink of the evening, bottles sparkling up and down the table like a whole line of British redcoats. James Cranshaw, at whose beautifully furnished home the dinner was given, played host as in old times, carrying in the whole roast suckling pig himself. Two beef and kidney puddings flanked the roast, and two platters of fried chicken flanked the puddings. Hot bread, both corn and wheat, gave off their good smell, and there were cornucopias full of dried fruit. “For the land is plentiful, let it be known far and wide.” Sitting next to Paine, Cranshaw pointed out the beauties of his Philadelphia Chippendale:

“You will note, sir, the simple lines and the undecorated backs of the chairs. For the highboy, I confess nothing equals the mahogany product of Newport, in particular the brothers Granny. For chairs, Philadelphia holds the crown and nothing in England is as good, I say nothing, sir. In New England they desecrate the product with ladder backs and peasant seats of rush; here our sidechairs are quiet songs of beauty, the ball and claw arrived at its final function, the fretted back become Grecian in its gentle curves. Shall one doubt the future of America?”

“I wonder,” Paine thought.

They plied him with food and drink, and they talked of everything under the sun but the war. Not until the meal was done, the flip served, and the ladies had retired to the drawing room, did they come to the point. Then, over snuff and cigars, they pumped Paine about what he had seen at Germantown and Valley Forge.

“But you will admit that the leadership was mediocre?” they prodded him.

“The leadership, gentlemen, is sacrificing and courageous.”

“But stupid.”

“I deny that! Soldiers are not made overnight. We are not Prussians, but citizens of a republic.”

“Yet you cannot deny that Washington has failed constantly. What you told us you saw at Valley Forge is only final proof of his unfitness!”

“Unfitness!” Paine said quietly. “My good gentlemen, God help you!”

“Aren't you dramatizing, Paine?”

“What is the case in point?” Paine asked. “Do you want to be rid of Washington?”

“Let us say, rather, co-operate with him,” Lee said smoothly. “What Gates has done at Saratoga, his capture of Burgoyne's entire army, proves—”

“Proves nothing!” Paine snapped. “Have you forgotten that Gates deliberately abandoned Washington at the Delaware last year? I'm not afraid of words, gentlemen, and I'd as soon say traitor as anything else. At a price, Gates will sell, and I am not sure others haven't a price—” staring from face, to face.

“Paine, you're drunk!”

“Am I? Then I'll say what I would never dare to sober—I'll say, gentlemen, that you disgust me, that you are breaking down all that is decent in our Congress, that you are ready to sell, yes, damn it, ready to sell, and that when you lose Washington, you lose the war—”

The next night, someone tried to kill him, a pistol snapping and missing fire, and a week later a note that said politely that some things are spoken of, some not. But Rush sought him out in a tavern and said:

“Don't misjudge us, Paine. We aren't traitors, believe me.”

“But you would rather see me dead?”

“What do you mean?”

Paine told him, and Rush's face clouded and darkened. He assured Paine that he knew nothing about the attempt. “We are not assassins,” he said grimly.

In the streets of York, one day, he meet Irene Roberdeau. She greeted him warmly and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. She and her uncle were stopping at the Double Coach, and he walked there with her, telling her briefly what he had done since he had last seen her.

“You will never rest,” she said. “You will never have peace, Tom.”

“I suppose not.”

She told him that she was engaged to be married—when they reoccupied Philadelphia. He nodded, and she wondered from his face whether it mattered at all to him.

“We will take Philadelphia again?” she asked.

“I am sure we will.”

“Tom—”

He looked at her.

“It could have been different,” she said.

“I don't think it could.”

Work piled up as secretary to the committee. Again he was a clerk who sat up nights doing
Crisis
papers, yet somehow he managed to let his weight be felt, putting pressure on those he knew, speaking constantly of Washington's need, threatening, using himself as a wedge in the countless little plots, breaking them open, writing false orders to commandeer shoes and clothing, talking to the food brokers, promising everything under the sun, actually maneuvering a shipment of grain toward Valley Forge, drinking again, more than he should, writing words that cut like knives—

A change was coming over things. At the end of that winter of 1777-1778, the crucial point of the war arrived, and the Americans won, not through battles, but simply by existing as an army, as a military force. The tall, unhappy Virginian, who had failed so as a commander, proved his worth as a rallying point, and throughout that dreadful cold winter, he held a nucleus of his men around him. Perhaps if Howe, the British commander, had attacked Valley Forge, the American army—what was left of it—might have been utterly destroyed. But Philadelphia was comfortable, and Howe did not attack, and with spring there was not only a French alliance, the product of old Ben Franklin's careful work, but a reoccurrence of that incredible phenomenon, the American militia.