Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  “Go to hell!” Paine yelled.

  Then, one night, he sat in front of his candles and wrote and wrote. It came from the heart and now he had no trouble with words. All his hatred for slavery poured onto the paper, all his pent-up fury. And not able to print it himself, he went out in the morning and posted it to a rival magazine. A week later it was printed, and that same day Aitken rushed in holding it in his hand.

  “Be this yours?” he cried.

  “That it is,” Paine nodded.

  “Then out ye go and back to the dirt!”

  “Do you have another editor for a pound a week?” Paine smiled.

  “I give ye a month’s notice!”

  “Make it two months,” Paine said, “or by God, I’ll make it two weeks.”

  And that night, for the first time in a long while, Tom Paine slept quietly and easily without the benefit of drink.

  It was the twenty-fourth of April, seventeen seventy-five, the slow end of a cool, bright spring afternoon. Long, rich shadows lay over the cobbled streets, and on the air, blowing from the inland hills, was the tangy smell of growing things, new leaves, turned dirt. On that quiet afternoon, the streets of Philadelphia rang with hard-driven hoofbeats, and a lathered rider on a lathered horse drove to a halt in front of the City Tavern. He yelled that he had news, big news, mighty news, and from every side people came running. Then the rider refused to talk until he had finished off a mug of beer, and as a good horseman should, seen his horse wiped and watered. While he drank, the word spread like wildfire, and the crowd became larger and larger. Paine, who was at his shop, heard men shouting, and ran along with the rest.

  “It’s war,” the rider said, wiping his lips. “It’s bloody damn war!”

  Someone gave him a pinch of snuff; others kept back the crowd.

  “Of course, they knew that Hancock and Adams were at Lexington,” he said.

  Coherency was asked for: dates, details, background.

  “That was April eighteenth,” he said.

  There was a sudden hush; news went slowly, but events moved fast, and with startled, pale faces the men and women in the crowd looked at each other.

  “They were at Pastor Clark’s house,” the messenger went on. “That was all right. Men went out of Boston to warn them, and there was time enough, since the redcoats went on foot and our boys rode like hell. And Pastor Clark kept a cool head; he sent them away.”

  “They weren’t captured, Hancock and. Adams?”

  “They got away.”

  Again the hush; the journalists scribbled furiously, but the rest waited, and the only sound was the shrieking of children who scurried like hares on the outside of the crowd. The rider called for another mug of beer, and it was rushed through the crowd.

  “He couldn’t send the whole town away,” the messenger said. “They were all awake, and most of them stayed awake—” There was more talk, more beer, more questions. Bit by bit the whole story came out, haltingly some of it, some with a rush, sometimes a long break when the rider just stared and attempted to comprehend the events he was narrating.

  That night of the eighteenth, few of the Lexington villagers slept. Most of those who were dragged home by their wives dressed themselves and slipped away, taking gun, powderhorn, and bullet pouch with them, to join the group at the tavern. The devil walked tonight, but angels were behind him; there was never such a night before, and there wouldn’t be one again. The men at the tavern talked in whispers, although they could have shouted and not found a sleeping body to be wakened, and they fingered their guns nervously, counted their bullets, and wondered whether to shoot a man was any different from shooting squirrels and rabbits. Captain Parker, their commander, who had seen guns go off during the French War, was none too easy himself, and found it difficult to answer all the questions flung at him.

  A while before dawn, out of a need to do something, Parker sent Zeke Sudberry over to the church to set the bells ringing. Zeke rang until everyone in the village was thoroughly awake, the women with their heads out the windows crying, “Shame, shame that a lot of grown men don’t know any better!”

  Parker told his men to fall in, which they did rather self-consciously, grinning at each other, whispering back and forth:

  “Fine soldier you are, Isaac.”

  “Click your heels, Jed. Act like you got a real fancy waistcoat on.”

  And to fourteen-year-old Jerry Hicks, “Now, Jerry, why don’t you go home and study your lessons.”

  “Forward march!” Parker shouted, and they stamped over to the lawn in front of the Congregational Church. Once there, Parker scratched his head, seemingly unable to think of a further movement. The pastor, a light fowling piece in his hand, came out and said, “Bless my soul, and it isn’t Sunday.”

  It was nice having him there, and everyone became easier and began to talk a great deal. The gray of the dawn was now changing to pastel pink and peach and taupe, and across the fields the crows screamed angrily, “Caw, caw, caw!” Joshua Lang’s dog, who was a fool for any sort of bird noise, ran toward the crows, barking at the top of his lungs.

  Then the talk stopped; they stiffened; they looked at one another. There was another sound in the world. Faintly, thinly at first, and then more clearly, and then sharp and hard came the beating of drums, the shrilling of pipes, a mocking swinging cadence, an invitation to glory, death—and God only knows what else.

  No one had to say who it was; they knew, and no one spoke. Leaning on their guns in that cheerful April morning, tense, frightened most of them, knowing for the first time in their lives an overpowering desire to run away, men, boys, old gaffers, children, the simple folk of a simple New England farming community, they kept their appointment with destiny.

  At the City Tavern in Philadelphia, the rider had his fourth glass of beer and said, “They stood, by God!”

  “A fight?” someone asked.

  “Hell, man! I said they stood. Boy and man, they faced up and goddamned the redcoats all to hell.”

  “And then?”

  “You never saw a bloody lobster turn his back on a gun,” the messenger snorted.

  The redcoat troops marched to within a dozen yards of the villagers before their officer commanded them to halt, and then they stood in their precise files, in their precise and colorful uniforms, in their great shakos, in their white wigs and white belting, men of London, of Suffolk and Norfolk, of Devon and Wales and Scotland and Ireland, staring so curiously at the gawky farmers, who, having come from the same places that bred them, were now outlanders, incredible rustics. For long moments the two groups faced one another; it was a moment the redcoats were trained for, but the farmers’ hands were wet on their guns.

  Then Major Pitcairn, commanding the British, made up his mind, spurred to the front and roared, “Disperse!”

  The farmers growled.

  “God damn you bloody rebels, lay down your guns!”

  It was there, hot and terrible; they were rebels. This idea that they had conceived, that they should be free men with the right to live their lives in their own way, this tenuous, dream-like idea of liberty that men of good will had played with for thousands of years had suddenly come to its brutish head on a village green in Lexington. The farmers growled and didn’t lay down their arms; instead one of them fired, and in the moment of stillness after the roar of the big musket had echoed and re-echoed, a redcoat clutched at his tunic, knelt, and then rolled over on the ground.

  After that, there was no order, no memory even. The redcoat files fired a volley; the farmers fired their guns singly, by twos and threes. The women screamed and came running from their houses. Children began to cry and dogs barked madly. Then the firing died away and there was no sound except the moans of the wounded and the shrill pleading of the women.

  A fifth glass of beer in front of the City Tavern in Philadelphia, and the rider told how the redcoats had marched away. “They were not after Lexington, but after Concord,” he explained. “That’s wher
e the stores were.”

  “They took the farmers?” someone asked.

  “No, they did not take them! Do you take a mad dog? They left well enough alone and went to Concord and walked into the town and stayed there maybe four, five hours. Then they set out back with never a thing done, like their wits were addled. And when they came to the bridge, the folk was waiting for them, not a few now, but over four hundred.

  “‘You dirty bastards!’ the major yells, ‘you dirty peasant bastards! Clear out and back to home!’

  “They didn’t move,” the rider said.

  “God damn you bastards, clear the bridge!” the major roared.

  They were solemn and they didn’t move; their jaws worked evenly; their guns crept to level and their lips tightened, yet they didn’t move. And then the British attacked and hell broke loose. Cannon roared, and there was crash after crash of musketry. With bayonets fixed, the British charged the bridge, and with clubbed muskets the farmers drove them back. Yelling, screaming, cursing, praying, the Yankees forced the redcoats off the bridge back on the Concord side of the stream. But the effort couldn’t be sustained; they were farmers, not soldiers, and after the first heat of rage had passed, they gave back and allowed the redcoats to re-form, cross the bridge, and resume their march toward Lexington.

  It was only then, after they had laid out their dead and tended their wounded, that the farmers realized a victory had slipped through their fingers. A cold New England bitterness took the place of their hot-headed fury. They picked up their guns and began to run—down the road to Lexington.

  It was six miles to Lexington, six miles of perdition for the redcoats. The whole countryside blazed, and that April afternoon every stone wall, every fence, every house, every bush, every tree roared defiance. Sick men crawled to their windows to fire at the invaders, boys crept through the grass and picked their targets, women behind barn doors loaded guns for their husbands, farmers ran the length of New England stone walls, firing again and again. A boy climbed into a tree with a brace of horse pistols, killed a redcoat subaltern passing underneath, and himself was shot. But on the whole, the redcoat volleys were useless against this stabbing, hacking, hidden warfare.

  There was no leadership, no direction, no command; the farmers fought instinctively, desperately, more brilliantly than they were ever to fight again, as if they knew that here, today, the poor, suffering simple folk had finally felt their power.

  Six miles to Lexington before the British had any surcease. The town was a place of homes, and in the town were women and children, and therefore the men waited out in the fields and the woods. At Lexington, reinforcements met the redcoats, but at the same time hundreds and hundreds of farmers, drawn by the noise of the firing, by the swiftly spread news, were converging on the village.

  Reinforced, the British set out once more on their retreat to Boston—and this time the hell was worse. Stabbed, hacked, bleeding, they staggered along—

  “They got to Charlestown,” the rider said, “what was left of them.”

  5

  THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONIST

  OUT OF it, the noise, the tumult, the strange story that the rider brought down from New England, was coming something new, something colossal and beyond understanding, something that could be translated into movement and action, but not into plan and reason. So Tom Paine thought the next day, standing as one of the surging mob in front of the State House, the biggest mob in all the history of Philadelphia, almost eight thousand people. The mob was a mob and no more; it yelled, shouted, flurried, eddied, and quieted partially now and again to listen to various speakers who climbed up to denounce tyrants and oppression, both very general and very safe terms. Predominantly, the mob was pro-Boston in sentiment, but here and there. a Tory stood, smiling the way Tories were prone to smile these past several months.

  For all that speakers were addressing the whole mob, smaller fry competed in their own particular circle, and Jackson Earle, a journeyman wheelwright, who was delivering a furious indictment of kings and tyrants in general, and one king in particular, called upon Paine to be his witness.

  “Tom,” he demanded, “do we have over us a German or an Englishman?”

  Paine shrugged. Yesterday had excited and terrified him, but today he was cold, and the old lassitude was returning. He had dreamed one brief, bright vision, and he didn’t know now why this crowd was helping it to dissipate. Yet he knew one thing, that he was outside of it; he was Paine, the editor, he had been Paine, the beggar, but in both stages, he had nothing. He could hate and squirm and protest, but how could he dream?

  “George, I mean,” Earle persisted.

  “German, I suppose.”

  “German! And what manner of a German?” Earle asked the crowd. “A slaving Hanoverian, a fat, guzzling swine—and his is the divine right! From God? Now listen, my good friends, and I’ll tell you! Put me in God’s place—”

  The speaker, Quincy Lee, perched on an impromptu platform of boxes, was begging for quiet. Arnold, who was a Quaker, had just proposed a militia, armed. “And what of it?” Lee yelled at the top of his lungs, a tall, gangling, crosseyed man, hopping with excitement. “What have the people to say?”

  The crowd roared.

  “Who will be the first to step up and offer, as I offer, my life, my arms, my sword for this sacred thing called freedom—”

  How the crowd roared!

  “As they died at Lexington and Concord—”

  As Paine pushed out of the crowd, Arnold was crying, “As Englishmen have always fought for the rights of Englishmen—”

  “Drinking?” Aitken said to him as he came in out of the cool, starlit night.

  “Drinking,” Paine nodded.

  “Yer liver will be so rotten ye’ll no’ have it in you long.”

  Paine grinned and nodded again.

  “Were ye at the square today?”

  “I was there,” Paine said, dropping into a chair and staring at his feet.

  “And were ye happy now that ye got yer blood and thunder?”

  “I was not happy,” Paine said. “I was afraid.”

  “Then ye’re drunk. My little man, ye’re good on paper, but bad with a clenched fist.”

  “I wasn’t afraid of that.”

  “Ye should no’ be.” The Scotsman had settled his long form back against the counter, and now was taking a savage delight in prodding his editor. “Ye should no’ be, I tell ye, for what is yer life worth?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ah, then—and ye admit it?”

  “I know it,” Paine said savagely.

  “But ye’re afraid.”

  Someone knocked at the door, and Aitken broke off his attack to answer. It was an old man whom Paine knew by sight, Isaac de Heroz, the beadle of the Jewish congregation. Under his arm he carried a tattered prayer book, which, after bowing in slow greeting to both Paine and the Scotsman, he spread on the counter, handling the loose pages gently and lovingly.

  “Can you print one like it?” he asked Aitken.

  Both Paine and Aitken bent over the book, Paine looking curiously at the first Hebrew writing he had ever seen, Aitken squinting at the old type.

  “I have no’ the letters nor the skill.”

  “I have some type, not all. The rest you can cast. You set as they are set.”

  “And what is the meaning? I will no’ set a devil’s concoction.”

  “They are prayers,” the old man smiled.

  “I would no’ set a Papish prayer,” Aitken said doggedly. “I would no’ set a heathen prayer. Yet ye ask me to break my neck contriving the letters.”

  “They are simple prayers that anyone could understand,” the old man said softly.

  “Read that in English,” Aitken said, turning the pages and pointing at random.

  The old man read,

  “These things I do remember: O I pour

  my soul out for them. All the ages long

  hatred pursueth us; through a
ll the years

  ignorance like a monster hath devoured

  our martyrs as in one long day of blood.

  Rulers have risen through the endless years,

  oppressive, savage in their witless power,

  filled with a futile thought: to make an end

  of that which God hath cherished. There was once

  a tyrant searching in the Book of God

  For some word there to serve him as a sword

  to slay us; and he found the line which spake:

  ‘He that doth steal a man and selleth him,

  he shall be surely put to death—’”

  Paine stopped him, putting a hand on the old man’s arm. “That’s enough, father, we’ll print it.”

  Aitken, who was going to say something, looked at Paine and stayed quiet, and Paine asked the old man, “Were you at the State House today?”

  “I was there.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “I thought that this is the beginning of something long and hard.”

  That night, past midnight, hours after the old man had gone, Paine sat and watched Aitken wrestle with the Hebrew characters and curse under his breath.

  “Go to bed,” Aitken told him for the fifth time.

  “I’m in no mood for sleep.”

  “I ought to give ye notice, getting me into this hell’s broth.”

  Paine wanted desperately to talk; he wanted a human being to sound to his thoughts; he wanted to hear laughter and tears, song and music.

  “Have you ever loved a woman?” he asked Aitken.

  “Are ye daft?”

  He wanted to find a part of his past he could take something from, and then give it to another before it vanished like smoke.

  Paine had been a staymaker in Thetford, in London, in Dover, in Sandwich, in Portsmouth and Brighton in the south, at Bath, at Winchester, at Bristol—no place could hold him. Always when he tried another trade, it was back to stays, from weaving, cobbling, carving, sewing, digging, plowing, planting, it was back to stays, which was his place. And it was at Sandwich that he saw Mary Lambert.

  She was plump, saucy, pretty in a way; she had a dimple in either cheek, brown eyes, round arms, and she was a few years younger than he. At that time, he was twenty-one.