Citizen Tom Paine (25 page)

He took the case to Robert Morris, the minister of finance. “Of course, their claims are just,” he pointed out to Morris. No one could say otherwise. But was this the time? Could Morris do something?

“Something, naturally,” Morris said. It seemed so long ago that they were fighting each other. “These men are deserving, they will be paid,” Morris assured Paine. “You were right not to encourage sedition. If the war may be considered won, then certain legal practices must be observed—”

Thoughtfully, Morris said, “You could turn your very considerable writing ability to our use, Paine. The government could be made to realize—”

“I didn't come for that.”

“No, merely a thought, let us leave it in a place where we can take it up again.” After a moment, Morris said, “There is no reason why we should be enemies.”

Paine nodded and left; of course, no reason. Revolution and counter-revolution were done now. Men turned their hands to reasonable things.

Some writing, drawing pay from a government that no longer needed him, a new suit of clothes, a piece explaining the revolution to Europe, an emasculated piece, another
Crisis
with a touch of the old fire—why isn't peace formalized?

A few weeks with Kirkbride. Old soldiers dropped in; they talked of a thousand years ago, when they marched from Hackensack to the Delaware; but there was another trend of talk. The future bulked bright and large in America.

But how for him?

Desperately, he tried to interest himself in the future of America, the spoils and the glory, the boasting and memories, the speculations, the coming boom, the pride of being a free citizen in a great republic.

“Where freedom is not, there is my country,” he had said once.

The peace came; America strutted like a peacock, free and independent. Fireworks and flag-waving and speeches and banquets and glory without end.

A tired Englishman who was once a staymaker, among other things, wrote:

“The times that tried men's souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.…”

He might have signed it: Tom Paine, revolutionist at large.

P
ART
T
WO

EUROPE

11

GIVE ME SEVEN YEARS

B
LAKE
, the painter and the poet, said to him, to Tom Paine, “They are going to hang someone, and it might as well be you. They intend it to be you. They've longed to put a rope around your neck since 1776. You can't bait the lion in his den interminably, and England isn't America—”

“England isn't America,” Paine agreed. He knew that by now.

“Then get out of London. Get out of England. Dead, you're no good to anyone.”

“Run away,” Paine murmured, and Blake laughed grimly.

“I can't laugh,” Paine said. It had come down like a castle of cards; it was the year seventeen ninety-two, and he was Thomas Paine, esquire, revolutionist at large, packing an old valise hurriedly, preparing to flee from London and not be hanged—not yet. He was only fifty-five. He had said, “Give me seven years, and I will write a
Common Sense
for every nation in Europe.” And now it was done in England. He had written a book called
The Rights of Man
, but somehow there were not the same bitter, stubborn farmers who had taken up their guns at Concord and Lexington. And he was fifty-five and tired and running away.

It was still dark, an hour or so before dawn, when Frost and Audibert pounded on his door and demanded to know what on God's earth was keeping him.

Anything into the valise now; a copy of
The Rights of Man
, an undershirt, and a half-finished manuscript.

“I'm coming—”

“The Dover stage won't wait—and the hangman won't!”

“I said I'm coming!”

Then it was done now, and England had slipped back to what England had been before. The bright, quick flame of glory was over; the little plots hatched in cellars and taverns were over. The forty-two muskets in Thaddeus Hatter's basement would stay there until they fell apart with rust. The barrel of gunpowder had been rolled into the Thames, and the shipworkers and miners and weavers and shopkeepers would stare at each other with the guilty, ashamed look of men who had for a moment dreamed the impossible and dared to believe it.

“I'm coming,” Paine said.

In the stage, lurching over the pitted road that led to Dover, Frost nudged him and whispered, “In front, Leonard Jane.” Jane was an agent of the crown, one of the many sharp-faced men who made their way here and there and saw things; it was before the day of the secret service.

“And I thought you said no one would know,” Paine complained petulantly.

“Well, they know—”

In the pale tint of the early dawn, and then flushed by the bright red sun of morning, he had to sit and realize what it would mean to die, to be stretched, hanged by the neck, to have that bit of doggerel shrieked by every ragged urchin as they rode him to the gallows:

“
Paine, Paine, damned be his name
,

Damned be his fame and lasting his shame
,

God damn Paine! God damn Paine!
”

In his rush of thought, he whispered to Audibert, “If they take me, go to America, and go to Washington who remembers me, tell him how it was here, tell him there's no difference, England or America, only the want of a man like him—”

They didn't take him, but only because they weren't sure of themselves. “Even here,” Audibert said, “you can't arrest a man without a warrant.” And something had gone wrong; when they reached the customs at Dover, the warrant hadn't come through yet.

The customs men searched every bit of their luggage, found Paine's book, and tore it in half and threw it on the floor, “That for the rights of man and god damn you!”

Paine forgot what it meant to be hanged and said, “Shut your dirty mouth,” a ringing tone in his voice that harked back ten years. Paine had been a soldier, and his eyes flashing he said, “Shut your dirty mouth!” Then he picked up the two halves of his book.

They were locked in a room, the three of them, and down from the barracks marched a detachment of six redcoats to stand guard outside the door.

“If the packet leaves without us,” Frost said—and then drew a line on his throat with one finger.

A crowd began to gather around the customs house, and soon they were screaming, “Paine, Paine, damned be his name!”

“Your people,” Frost said caustically, “who would rise to the banner of freedom and righteousness.”

“Poor devils.”

“Don't waste sympathy on them. If we're not out of here soon, we'll require all your sympathy.”

“What are they holding us for?”

“A warrant, what else?”

Then the captain of customs opened the door and said, “Only by the grace of God, Paine, do you leave here. Don't come back to England.”

Then Paine's party pushed through the hooting, screeching crowd onto the packet. The anchor came up, and two barges began to warp out the little Channel ferry. Paine stood on deck.

“Will you come back?” Audibert asked him, as the white chalk cliffs receded.

“I'll come back. It will be France, England and America—and then the whole world. I'll come back.”

Safe on board the Channel boat, leaving England, leaving the hangman and the mob, Paine reflected how easily, how insidiously all this turmoil had begun. Back in America, when the struggle was over, he had put the revolution behind him; he had wanted to be Thomas Paine, esquire, dreaming of something for himself akin to what Washington had at Mt. Vernon. He was not an old man when the revolution ended; he was only forty-six, and a man's life isn't over then. Look at Franklin.

There comes a time when a man wants to sit back and say, “I've done enough; I want to eat and drink and sleep and talk and think.” There was one magnificent, never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, when he sat for hours in the warm sunlight with Franklin talking of things scientific and things philosophical. “Play with science,” Franklin told him. “That's the new age, the dawning.”

“I would like to play,” Paine said, his eyes curious.

Well, he was deserving of it, wasn't he? Not that he had made the war alone; but neither had Washington, nor Jefferson, nor Adams either. His part was not so slight that he was greedy in asking for some small reward, in petitioning Congress to give him some sort of livelihood, since he had nothing but revolution, since he was a specialist in change, and change was over.

They voted him a little money and a place in Bordentown and another in New Rochelle. It was enough. He lived simply, some drink, plain food, a workshop—correspondence with the scientific minds all over the world who were pricking at the future.

“Thomas Paine, esquire,” he signed himself.

It was to be expected that a man would change; the times that tried men's souls were over. He dabbled in politics, but in a gentlemanly way, the way Morris or Rush would dabble. And when he saw a beggar now, a poor drunken sot, an aging veteran, racked with dysentery and syphilis, a one-armed garrulous soldier, an artilleryman whose eyes had been blasted away by flaming powder, he did not say, “There, but by the grace of God, goes Thomas Paine.”

But that was to be expected too.

And sometimes he was a little ashamed of these louts who came to his house and cried, “Hey, Tom, hey there, old Common Sense, hey there, old comrade.”

Talking of old times, look what they had made of themselves! The old times were over.

Better than, that to dine with Washington, the tall fox-hunter whose name was spoken so reverently now, but who had nevertheless not forgotten the cold march down through the Jerseys.

“Madeira, Thomas?”

“I incline to claret.”

“But Madeira, Thomas, with all the sunshine of the blue sky of Portugal.”

Better to dine with Morris, Reed, Rush, now that old feuds had been patched up, old differences set aside; these were quality and these were the men who counted. They sipped their brandy and they talked of high financial matters, and they were the powers behind this new United States of America; and Paine was permitted to sit in and see what delicate maneuvering made the world go round.

A man changes; or perhaps that is wrong and a man never changes. Here, in this year of seventeen ninety-two, leaning on the rail of the Channel boat that was taking him over to France, away from an England that would have hanged him, watching the white chalk cliffs of Dover, he cast back in his memory and let the events run by, one by one, as they had happened.

There was the iron bridge, a scientific experiment—and hadn't Ben Franklin said that he had an eye and a mind for science? The bridge was something new in the world, of course, but a dreamer could see that iron was the coming master of man's fate. And why not a bridge to begin, so useful a thing, so common a thing? So he played with the idea, sketched, and made, in model, a bridge of iron. People came forty miles to see it. Anyone could see that the bridge was just “Common Sense,” they said, making a poor pun of what had once been glory. The copies of the book
Common Sense
were turning yellow, stuffed, away in attics and chests, but folks said, “Mighty smart feller, Paine. Thinks like a Yankee.”

He took the model to Philadelphia and set it up in Ben Franklin's garden in Market Street. What a time that was! So many citizens called him Doctor Paine that he began to believe it—almost. He was toasted at dinners, luncheons, parties; four white wigs he owned, and his shirts were starched and faultlessly clean.

And once Rush mentioned, “How does it seem now to read
Common Sense
, Paine?”

“
Common Sense?
” as if it were some small matter that he could not easily call to mind.

“It was good for the times,” he said judiciously.

“And what times they were, those old days,” Rush laughed.

“At each other's throats.”

“But now there's enough for all.”

“For all, of course,” Paine agreed.

Then he took his bridge model to France. Five years ago that was, 1787, Thomas Paine, esquire, crossing the broad ocean to France, not a bumpkin sick in a dirty, festering hold, but a gentleman of parts, philosopher, scientist, politician, financier you might say; first-class stateroom, walks on the deck while passengers pointed him out to each other.

His leaving America was in itself a reminder of the past; he still had enemies, enough to keep the State of Pennsylvania from erecting his iron bridge; and though he had hoped to go to France anyway, it was mostly bridge matter that sent him there. He had corresponded with the French scientists, spoken to Franklin about them, and he was quite certain they were the cleverest in the world, not to mention the wittiest. France would take up his bridge, then the world, then acclaim, then fortune. On shipboard, he felt youthful enough to have a mild flirtation with a Mrs. Granger of Baltimore, a flirtation which Paine pressed to the bedside with a grace and tact of which he would once not have thought himself capable. But why not? He was only in the summer of his life, healthier than he had ever been before, famous; forgotten as staymaker, cobbler, excise man, but Paine the philosopher and scientist.

France welcomed him; old, imperial France. King Louis sat at royal court at Versailles. If there were mutterings somewhere, what had Paine to do with them? This was France, not America. Taking a hint from Franklin, he played the part of the simple but wise American, plain brown breeches, no wig, no scent, white shirt, black coat, black shoes, cotton stockings, a cordial, winning smile that made up for his ignorance of the tongue. He met them all, the politicians, philosophers, the wits and the fops, the scientists, the high lords and the humble scholars. To a man of talent, there were no barriers—and the French food! He would say: