The Whites of their Eyes (18 page)

While the war lasted, Benjamin Edes paid a fine for failing to serve in the army in order to print his
Gazette
. After the British evacuated Boston, Edes moved his printing press back to the city. Andrew Eliot, though, made plans to move to Concord, in case Boston should fall to the British once again. Eliot died in 1778; at his death, Edes’s
Gazette
lamented that the reverend had gone “off the Stage of Action entirely unnoticed.”
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Benjamin Mecom escaped from the house in New Jersey where Benjamin Franklin had arranged for him to be confined. He disappeared during the Battle
of Trenton and, as Jane Mecom wrote to her brother, had “never been heard of since.”
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The farmer’s wife who was taking care of Jane Mecom’s other mad son, Peter, asked for more money, five dollars a week, threatening that if she didn’t get it, “she would send him to boston.” This terrified Jane Mecom, who tried “to git Him Put in to the Alms house” but was told “there is no provision for such persons there.” Peter Franklin Mecom died not long after, deprived of reason, deprived, even, of speech. As his mother wrote, he “sunk in to Eternity without
a Groan.”
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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather, William Emerson, enlisted in the Continental army, as a chaplain, but fell sick on the march to Ticonderoga and died in 1778.
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That year, Phillis Wheatley returned to Boston, married a black shopkeeper named John Peters, and announced her plan to publish a second book of poems, to be dedicated to Benjamin Franklin. It was never published. Instead, she gave birth to three children in the space of five years. Her husband went to debtors’ prison. Her first two children were dead by the time she gave birth to her third. She died, at the age o
f thirty-one, of childbed fever, along with the baby at her breast. “The world is a severe schoolmaster,” Wheatley once wrote. She was buried, with her infant daughter, in an unmarked grave on Copp’s Hill.
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During the war, tens of thousands of slaves left their homes, escaping from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up some-place else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore’s regiment was greeted by her
master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, thousands of blacks went with them, in port after port. In Charleston, after all the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the flocks of black men, women, and children frantic to leave the United States rather than be taken back up into slavery. A handful managed to duck under the redcoats’ raised bayonets, jump off the docks, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet—whose crowded ships included the aptly named
Free Briton
. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on
board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off.
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Harry Washington, who had run away from Mount Vernon, left America in 1783. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated from New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.”
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Washington, with some fifteen hundred families, settled in bleak Birch-town, Nova Scotia. By the time he arrived there in August of 1783, though, there was nothing to eat, it was too late to plant, and it turn
ed out that the topsoil was too thin to plant much, anyway. Two years later, the settlers were still starving. A settler named Boston King reported, “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.” They made a plan to leave, and to sail to Sierra Leone. In January 1792, nearly twelve hundred black men
, women, and children, including Harry Washington, found berths on fifteen ships in Halifax harbor. Each family received a certificate “indicating the plot of land ‘free of expence’ they were to be given ‘upon arrival in Africa.’ ” But the colony’s new capital, the Province of Freedom, did not live up to its name. Boston King’s wife, Violet, died of “putrid fever” within weeks of arrival. The promised plots turned out to be not so free after all; investors demanded exorbitant quit rent payments. “We wance did call it Free Town,” one worn-out settler wrote in 1795, but now “have
a reason to call it a town of slavery.” By 1799 Sierra Leone’s settlers had become so discontent, so revolutionary in their rejection of the colony’s white government, that it was said they were “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” The next year, a group of rebels tried to form a sovereign republic. They were crushed. Tried by a special military tribunal, they were banished from Freetown to the other side of the Sierra Leone River. In their exile, they elected Harry Washington as their leader, just months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon.
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In 1777, Vermont became the first state to outlaw slavery. That same year, John Adams defeated a bill put forward, in the Massachusetts legislature, to do the same.
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Slavery ended in Massachusetts in the 1780s, with vague court rulings, reinforced by the weight of public opinion.
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James Otis was killed by lightning in 1784. Sometime before he died, he burned all of his papers in a bonfire that lasted two days. In 1785, the government of Massachusetts passed its own stamp tax. Benjamin Edes argued against it, signing himself “The Printer’s Friend.” Thomas Paine left the United
States for England in 1787. “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Franklin once said, to which Paine replied, “Wherever liberty is not, there is my country.” Franklin spent the last years of his life in Philadelphia. He died in 1790, at the age of eighty-four. In his will, he left one hundred pounds to the public schools of Boston. To his sister, Jane, he left the house in which she lived. “Who that Know & Love you,” Jane Mecom wrote to her brother, just months before he died, “can Bare the thoughts of Serviving you in this Gloomy world.”
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Twenty thousand mourners came to Franklin’s funeral, but his fate, in the American imagination, is a dreary tale. “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy,
wealthy and wise,” Franklin had written in “The Way to Wealth.” “The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents’ experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell,” Mark Twain once wrote. By the time Twain was writing, in 1870, Poor Richard’s parody, the useless advice to a wayward nephew, was taken literally. Of the thrifty, frugal, prudent, sober, homey, quaint, sexless, humorless, and preachy Benjamin Franklin, the prophet of prosperity, Twain wrote, “He was a hard lot.”
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To his twee reputation, Franklin’s breath-takingly vast, cosmopolitan, enlightened, revolutionary
life seems to matter not at all. As Poor Richard once said, sometimes “Force shites upon Reason’s back.”
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“It is an age of revolutions, in which every thing may be looked for,” Paine wrote in the first part of
The Rights of Man
, in 1791, in England. The next year Paine wrote
Rights of Man, Part the Second
: “When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.” By way of remedy, Paine proposed tax tables calculated down to the last shilling, to pay for public services.
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The first part of
Rights of Man
sold fifty thousand copies in just three months. The second part was outsold only b
y the Bible. But British conservatives didn’t want to follow France, especially as the news from Paris grew more gruesome. Paine was charged with seditious libel. In 1792, he fled to Paris, where, as the Reign of Terror unfolded, he drafted the first part of
The Age of Reason
. In 1793, when the police knocked at his door, he handed a stash of papers to his friend, the American poet and statesman Joel Barlow. Barlow carried the manuscript to the printers; the police carried Paine to an eight-by-ten cell on the ground floor of a prison that had once been a palace. There, he would write
most of the second part of
The Age of Reason
as he watched his fellow inmates go daily to their deaths. (In six weeks in the summer of 1794, Jacobins executed more than thirteen hundred people.)
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In
The Age of Reason
, Paine was uncompromising in his condemnation of the world’s religions. Paine believed in God; he just didn’t believe in scriptures; these he considered hearsay, lies, fables, and frauds that served to wreak havoc with humanity while hiding the beauty of God’s creation, the evidence for which was everywhere obvious in “the universe we behold.” He offered his own creed:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. But . . . I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

For this, Paine was destroyed. He lost, among other things, the friendship of Samuel Adams, who had become governor of Massachusetts in 1793, when John Hancock died in office. Adams wrote to Paine, bitterly, “Do you think that your pen, or the pen of any other man, can unchristianize the mass of our citizens?”
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Jane Mecom died in Boston in 1794. A notice of her death in a Boston newspaper is the only time her name ever appeared in print: “Mrs. Jane Mecom, widow of the late Mr. Edward Mecom of this town and the only sister of Doctor Franklin, in the 83d year of her age.”
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What few books she owned, and most of her letters, have since been lost.

Two years later, John Adams was elected president, narrowly defeating Thomas Jefferson. Adams’s administration proved controversial and inspired printers opposed to it to found seventy new papers (during Adams’s term in office, newspapers grew at four times the rate of the population).
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In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, edited the
Aurora
, a newspaper as passionately devoted to the cause of unseating John Adams from the presidency as James Franklin’s
Courant
had been to tipping over Cotton Mather’s pulpit.
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In Boston, Adams’s election left Benja
min Edes despairing. Edes, like Mercy Otis Warren, believed that Adams had betrayed everything the Revolution had been fought for. In 1798, Adams signed the Sedition Act, making defaming his administration a federal crime. Twenty-five people were arrested, fifteen indicted, and ten convicted, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, who died of yellow fever before he could be brought to court.
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Two months after passage of the Sedition Act, Edes gave up his newspaper. “I bid you
FAREWELL
!” he wrote, in the final issue of the
Boston Gazette
. “Maintain your Virtue—Cherish your Liberties!”
He closed his shop. He moved his printing press into his house—it filled the whole of his small parlor—and tinkered with types.
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Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800. Without the three-fifths clause, Adams would have won, which is why one Boston newspaper writer observed that Jefferson had ridden “into the temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves.”
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On March 4, 1801, the day after the Sedition Act expired, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated. In his inaugural address, he talked about “the contest of opinion,” a contest waged, in his lifetime, in the pages of the newspaper. Three months after Jefferson’s inauguration, Edes died, destitute.
In his will, he left a single font of types to his son, Peter, who had suffered in his stead. The rest of his estate he instructed his wife to sell, to settle his debts.
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It wasn’t enough.

Thomas Paine returned to the United States in 1802, a broken man. Samuel Adams died in Boston the next year. In Paine’s tortured final years, living in New Rochelle and New York City, he displayed signs of dementia. He was besieged by visitors who came either to save his soul or to damn it. He told all of them to go to hell. When an old woman announced, “I come from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our blessed Savior Jesus Christ, you will be damned,” Paine replied, “Pshaw. God would not send such a foolish ugly
old woman as you.”
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The longer John Adams lived, the more he hated Thomas Paine. By the end of his life, the ex-president would call
Common Sense
“a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” Adams also railed that the latter part of the eighteenth century had come to be called “The Age of Reason”: “I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason.” But even Adams admitted, “I know no
t whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine,” concluding, “Call it then the Age of Paine.”
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Adams wrote those words, in 1806, as if Paine were already dead. He was not. That year, a neighbor of Paine’s came across the old man himself, in a tavern in New York, so drunk and disoriented and unwashed and unkempt that his toenails had grown over his toes. Once, Paine hobbled to the polls in New Rochelle to cast his vote in a local election. He
was told that he was not an American citizen and was turned away. In 1809, as the seventy-two-year-old Paine lay dying in a house in Greenwich Village, his doctor pressed him, “Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” Paine paused, then whispered, “I have no wish to believe on that subject.”
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