Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  Yet with his position, with the value Aitken placed upon him, with issue after issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine emerging under his hand, he still could not shake off his terror of life. Life was a beast, and when this holiday was over, the beast would tear at him again. A man was a fool to struggle or fight back, since in the end a man was grooved in his place, and in the world there was neither pity nor justice.

  That was until something happened on the nineteenth of April, in seventeen seventy-five. Then, for Paine, there was a beginning; a crack showed in the wall against which he had been battering his head, and sunlight came through. The devil reared up on his hind legs and bared his teeth, and twenty angels blew a mighty chorus upon their trumpets. But otherwise the world was mighty little disturbed; in places the sun shone, and in other places it rained, and the sound of musketry was heard no farther than a man may hear those things. No shot fired was heard round the world, and up and down the American coast line, where a motley arrangement of three million people were settled, life went on in die placid, bucolic way it had gone on before.

  But not in Lexington. On the evening of the eighteenth, a whooping, shouting, over-excited horseman drove into this pretty little New England village, and roaring at the top of his lungs woke everyone who was not already awake. From the white clapboard houses, the tavern, the manse, and even from a farm or two not properly in the village, the good Massachusetts householders came pouring, clad in their long white nightshirts and their tasseled white night caps, their clumsy firelocks in hand, their wives chattering behind them, their children poking heads out of upstairs windows.

  “What’s to pay?” they demanded of the rider, whose name was Paul Revere.

  “Hell’s to pay!” he shouted.

  From the house of the Reverend Jonah Clark came two gentlemen for whom his statement had deadly pertinence. They rubbed their necks feelingly and drew their nightshirts closer about them. Their names were Adams and Hancock; the first was a politician, the second a smuggler, and together they shared a stubborn resentment of foreign rule of the little seaboard colony wherein they lived. Their resentment had taken the form of meetings, congresses, incitements to riot, and wholesale parading of every grievance their compatriots might have; they were dealing with good material for their purpose, stubborn, stiff-necked farmers who had come from a fertile, pleasant land to scratch at this rocky coast simply because they had odd notions about religious and personal freedom. Now, albeit gingerly, the British king, the British prime minister, and the British government were hacking at these liberties of theirs, nibbling the edges, clipping away a right here, a privilege there, adding a tax here, a duty there; nothing really to make a man’s life less pleasant, less easy, but enough to set him to thinking if he was of this stiff-necked, stubborn breed.

  The hot-headed rider was brought down to earth by Pastor Clark, who wheedled detail after detail out of him, while the nightshirted farmers, angry to be thus routed from their sleep, crowded closer.

  “The British are coming,” he kept insisting.

  “From where? On foot?”

  He nodded and said from Boston. Then there was time. Pastor Clark assured everyone that there was time enough to think out things, and that there never was a Christian soul saved by hot-headedness, and that they might as well go back and get their sleep.

  “There’s time for sleep and time for other things,” someone snorted.

  “And time for sleep now,” the reverend said quietly. “God’s in his heaven by night as well as by day. But night was made for slumber.”

  “Now, pastor,” said a tall, hook-nosed husbandman, “will you be telling that to the redcoats?”

  “I will if I can herd them into my church,” Clark pronounced, and this sally fetched a laugh all around, easing the tension considerably. Someone dragged out a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch, stared at the face, and pronounced solemnly, “Two hours past midnight.”

  “Lord a mercy!” a woman squealed, and began to shout at her children to get their faces inside the window and go to bed, or she’d take a stick to them right this minute. A group of giggling girls managed to attract the attention of three nightshirted boys, weighted down by the immense firelocks they carried. Abner Green told his little sister to scat, and then he himself was dragged away by his mother, who had taken a firm grip on his ear. “Fine state of things,” she said. “Men acting like children and children acting like men.”

  The night was cool, the pastor’s words cooler, and the men, under the influence of both, drifted away, a few back to their beds, but most to the Buckman Tavern, where already a great fire was roaring in the hearth. The husbandmen leaned their guns against the kitchen wall, sent children and wives for their breeches, so loath were they to leave the excitement and warm comradeship of the group for even a moment, and then brewed pitcher after pitcher of hot flip, a concoction of rum, molasses, and beer—which they drank with a heady instinct that sometime before dawn destiny would come seeking them.

  But back at Clark’s house, Hancock and Adams still felt gingerly at their necks and wondered what was this strange devil of revolt they had raised. The pastor nodded, and agreed sagely that if the British caught them, they would no doubt hang them.

  “I hate to run away,” Hancock muttered.

  “This is only the beginning,” Clark said seriously. “Do you know what you’ve raised up? Men will fight and die, and there will be more than one running away.”

  “Don’t condemn me,” Hancock said. “I did what was right.”

  “We all do what is right,” the pastor nodded, “and I condemn no one. For me, tomorrow, I will take the Book under one arm and the gun under the other, and God forgive me. I never killed a man; I never thought I would, but there are times when a man puts God behind him and turns away his face. I’ll have horses brought for you, gentlemen.”

  It was curious how quickly the memories of the other world, England, Thetford, London, Dover, faded after Paine, with the dour blessing of Aitken, undertook the publication of the Pennsylvania Magazine. For the first time in his life, he had work he loved, work that did not demean him, work that allowed him the simple dignity of hope and intelligence. In the attic which the Scotsman had given him for an office, he sat and labored, in the beginning from dawn through to midnight. He had never been an editor; he had to learn typography, spelling, punctuation; he read the colonial magazines until his eyes ached to get the style, the taste, and, most of all, the political and economic feel of the colonies.

  He shed his Britishness as a duck sheds water. He had no time to travel now, but in the taverns and coffee houses, he buttonholed everyone who had been to the far-off countries, or who lived there and was passing through Philadelphia: New Yorkers, Vermont men, Virginians, men from the Deep South, Carolina, Georgia, drawling backwoodsmen, boatmen from the Ohio, soft-voiced Creoles from New Orleans, rangers who had crossed over the mountains into the wild cane-brake of Kentucky, leathery-skinned fishermen from Maine.

  Philadelphia was the place for that, and if you waited long enough the whole of America passed along Broad Street. Paine pumped them, and for the first time in his life he found many men, men from every walk of life, who treated him with respect.

  Out of this, out of the town itself, out of Aitken, out of the things he read, he was beginning to form a picture of America—a picture detailed by the fringe of tidewater colonization. Here was a land of no one people, of no one prejudice, of no one thought, a country so big that all England could be tucked away in a corner and forgotten, a country so youthful that half the people one met were foreigners or the first generation of foreigners, a country so inevitable that it was calmly, even lazily, stirring itself to revolt against the greatest power on earth.

  It was the inevitability of America that stirred him most; here was a new breed of men, not out of blood nor class nor birth, but out of a promise pure and simple; and the promise when summed up, when whittled down, when made positive and negative, shorn of all the
great frame of mountains, rivers, and valleys, was freedom, and no more and no less than that.

  He was not blind; he had been in the rat cage too long to ever be blinded, and he saw the bad with the good. It was flung in his face, for directly across the street from the print shop in which he worked was the chief public slave market of Philadelphia. There was brought the run of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Jersey human merchandise, the black to be sold body and soul and forever, the white to be auctioned off for bond, for debt, for punishment. Morning and afternoon, the auctioneer would be singing out: “Here’s a buck, here’s a buck, here’s a choice fat black buck, strong as iron, ripe as an apple, as full of juice as a rip-snorting stallion, feel him, come in back, gentlemen, come in back and see his virility, he’s been whipped fine, he’s been broken and trained—” Oh, it was the city of brotherly love, all right, but who ever went through it without stopping for an hour at the slave mart?

  The open shed where the selling took place fronted on the swank London Coffee House where the young fops, gotten out in laces and ribbons and silks and satins, a credible imitation of the bloods and macaronis in the old country, sipped their drinks and enjoyed the show.

  And there was not only the slave market; there were the stocks, the whipping posts, the gallows, the incredibly foul jails where debtors and murderers, men, women, and children were thrown together in a tight pen of death and disease.

  There was the bad with the good in Philadelphia, but there was no rat cage. If a man had guts or brains—or a little of each, he made his own way. Look at Franklin!

  But Aitken would say, when Paine paused at his work to stare at the shed across the road, “Keep a tight lip, Thomas, that be no part a yer business.”

  Sometimes Paine wondered what was his business.

  “Ye’ll no’ be writing slavery in the magazine,” die Scotsman said. “There’s slaver and non-slaver pay their shilling. Ye’ll no’ be writing rift and rebellion and incite to riot. I hold no brief for the fat king in London, but his way is a way of peace and prosperity, and I dinna hold with them that scream so loud for liberty.” Aitken was never quite sure what lay behind Paine’s rough, hook-nosed face, his twisted eyes that seemed to be turned inward more than outward. The magazine which had started off as a venture was rapidly becoming a success, six hundred for the first issue, fifteen hundred for the second—and, at a shilling a copy, Aitken could see a fortune just over the horizon.

  “I have a debt to you,” Paine murmured. “But the magazine is my making. Remember that.”

  “And yer my making, remember that,” Aitken said. “Ye were a dirty wretch when I picked you up. Show yer ingratitude to others, not to me.”

  A few months before Tom Paine arrived in America, a number of men on horseback had converged toward this same town of Philadelphia. They came from a good many of the countries that made up the fringe of settlements, and some were rich and some were poor; some were brilliant and some not so brilliant, and some were known in their day and others long afterward. There were the two cousins from Massachusetts, Sam and John Adams, Cushing from the same state, strange and burning those Yankee men were, Randolph from Virginia, Patrick Henry also from Virginia—and a big, quiet planter from the Potomac country—his name was Washington—Middleton from the Deep South, and many more, dandies, tradesmen, farmers, hunters, and philosophers.

  In Philadelphia they roamed all over the streets, mainly because many of them had never seen a good-sized city before; they ate too much, drank too much, talked too much. They called themselves the Continental Congress. They had a long list of grievances against the British way of government, taxes in which they had no say, repression of trade, heavy duties, import monopolies held by Britain, restrictions on manufacture, redcoat troops quartered on colonists, encouragement for the Indians on the frontier to kill and loot–but with all those grievances, they didn’t know what to do and hadn’t thought too deeply about what they could do.

  Not only that, but among themselves, they were strangers. The Yankees didn’t like slavery and made no bones about it, and the Tidewater and Deep South people didn’t like Yankees and made no bones about that either. Sam Adams, the rabble rouser from Boston, whom many of them thought just a wee bit mad, ventured to talk of complete independence; he was shut up and marked down for a fool and a dangerous fanatic. But he captured the imagination of a rawboned, bespectacled Virginian, Patrick Henry by name, who roared out, “By God, I am not a Virginian; I’m American!” Then, while the Congress was in session, Massachusetts reared up back at home and declared her independence from British authority. Paul Revere rode down from Boston to Philadelphia with the news, and the Congress wrote a Declaration of Rights. Then the bleak, terrible prospect of what they had done broke on them.

  “If it means war—” they said softly to one another.

  But, of course, it wouldn’t mean war; it simply couldn’t; they talked down any suggestion of danger; they talked and talked and talked, and all the words made them certain that everything would come out in the best way possible. They drank that peculiar, vile American concoction, flip, by the hundreds of gallons, and on October 27, 1774, they disbanded, saddled their horses, and started on the long ride home.

  Some months afterwards, the London, Dover, and Thetford staymaker, Tom Paine, devoured the record of all they had said and didn’t think it too wordy. “Words pile up,” he said, “and afterwards men do things. First the words.” He was holding out at the Ridgeway Coffee Shop with Clare Benton, the printer, Judah Perez, the Jewish fur trader, Anthony Bent, a smith, and Captain Isaac Lee of the Philadelphia militia.

  “This is a new thing here,” Paine said. “That’s why no one knows what to do.”

  “When the time comes to fight, we’ll know what to do,” Captain Lee insisted, giving stubborn emphasis to a theme he had repeated over and over.

  “No, we have to know what to do first. It’s no use to fight if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. Even if you win, it’s no good.”

  “And I think,” Perez put in, “that if you know what you’re fighting for, it doesn’t make too much difference if you win or lose.”

  “You don’t lose,” Paine said heatedly. “This is like no other thing the world has seen; it’s new; it’s a beginning, and it has to be explained. We have something here, and yet we haven’t got it, and suppose we lose it and it slips through our fingers?”

  “Then we’re as well off,” Bent grinned.

  “Are we? You don’t know; you’re American! I came from back there!”

  “What does that mean?” Benton demanded. “You shook the king’s hand?”

  “I didn’t even spit in his face,” Paine said sourly.

  “That kind of talk is still treason.”

  “Is it? Treason’s a word for a lot of things.”

  “Easy, easy,” the smith said.

  “I go easy,” Paine said. “Believe me, I hate no man for what he is, not even that fat German bastard, George the Third. But I’ve seen man nailed to a cross, nailed there for God knows how many thousands of years, nailed with lies, oppression, gunpowder, swords. Now someone puts an ax in my hand, and I have a chance to help cut down that cross. I don’t pass that chance by.” Paine’s voice was loud; his words rang out, and by the time he had finished speaking, half the men in the coffee house were gathered about the table. Someone put in, “Is it Independence you’re talking?”

  “Independence is a word.”

  “You seem almighty fond of words.”

  “And not afraid of them!” Paine roared. “I come into a land of free men and find them afraid of the one word that would bind their freedom! This is a land of promise, and there is no other on earth!”

  He was quieter on paper than vocally. All his life he had wanted to write, and now he had a whole magazine at his disposal. The more writing he did on his pound a week, the better pleased Aitken was, and Paine could see a good deal of reason in his desire to keep the magazine on the fence. His wr
iting wasn’t good, but he poured it onto paper—essays, bad poems, scientific research, even a letter or two to the great Benjamin Franklin. Fortunately for him, the literary taste of the Pennsylvania people was sufficiently untutored for them to accept Paine and the magazine and the dozen pen names he used—and even to be somewhat enthralled by the breathless pace of his energy. All at once Paine was a theologian, a historian, and a scientist, and he brought into the magazine the wide knowledge of a staymaker, a cobbler, a weaver, and an exciseman. The combination was good, and the circulation went up steadily.

  But Paine couldn’t stay quiet; he had too many memories, too many sleepless nights, too many dreams. Looking out of his windows, he would see the white chattel slaves being sold in the market. And there were other things he would see as, pen poised, he remembered all the years before now.

  “I’ll be raising yer wages,” Aitken said to him one day.

  He had respectability, position, a job—and yet he had nothing. His torments drove him to the brothels where were kept the limp-eyed, half-foolish bondwomen, brought over from England and Scotland by regular firms of dealers, selling their poor peasant graces to all comers for three shillings, sixpence of which was supposed to go for their freedom. Yet somehow none of them got their freedom, but became hard, painted, vile-tongued tarts. For Paine, there was no relief in those places, and even when he bought freedom for two of the girls, his conscience was not eased.

  Rum was a way out. He went back to the bottle, and was drunk more and more frequently. Deep in his cups, he had a run-in with Ben Frady, the Tory mouthpiece, and they were both dragged off before the magistrate.

  Aitken said, “Yer dirt, and back to the dirt ye go.”

  “God damn you, shut up!”

  “Be none too certain with yer damn Whiggish way. That pound more will no’ go on yer salary.”