by Howard Fast
He had a little room, a bed, a bolster, chest, coat-rack, and table, two fairly good suits of clothes, ink and paper. That was enough, a man should want no more. He needed a few pennies for candles, something for food, something for drink. During this time he no longer allowed himself to be drunk, yet he saw no reason to do without liquor. Rum helped him; caring little for himself or for what became of him, he was ready to use anything that might make his pen move more easily on the paper. He was writing stuff out of thought and making something out of nothing, and after he had worked steadily for five, six, or seven hours, the little room closed in on him. Rum helped; as he drank, his movements would become slow and painful, but the quill would continue to scratch, which was all that mattered. He had no delusions; what he wrote might never be read by more than a dozen persons, but it was all he could do and what he had to do. Men don’t make new worlds in an afternoon; brick has to be placed on brick, and the process is long and incredibly painful.
Without realizing it, he neglected his appearance, sometimes spending twenty-four hours in his room, shaving less often, hoarding his small store of money, allowing his stockings to wear out and his clothes to become shabby. Those citizens of Philadelphia who noticed the change remarked that Aitken was wise to fire him. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” they said. His money low, Paine spent a night writing a poem and took it to Aitken, who gave him a pound, certainly more than it was worth. But somewhere in his flint-like, Scotch shell, Aitken nursed a fondness for this plodding, almost bullish man, who childishly believed that the world wanted to hear his solution to its woes.
“How goes the masterpiece?” Aitken asked him.
“It’s no masterpiece. It’s an attempt at common sense, of which I have little enough, God knows.”
“I will no’ print it, so don’t come asking me.”
Paine grinned.
“Will ye have supper?”
“I will at that,” Paine nodded. He hadn’t eaten a good cooked meal in God knows how long, and he felt a sudden longing to be with people he knew. At Aitken’s table was Joshua Craige, a linen merchant recently come over from England, full of news of how London was taking the revolt. “There’s more for the colonies than against them,” Craige said. “You would think the revolt is coming there, not here.”
“And perhaps it is,” Paine said thoughtfully.
“And how do you make that out, mister?”
Paine shrugged and avoided the question. Only vaguely defined in his mind was a picture of the whole world renewing itself, dreams of a brotherhood so vast, so complete that the half-drawn conception was overpowering and beyond words.
Jefferson would not call attention to Paine’s poverty, his failings in matters of dress; Jefferson was in the process of adoring the common man, and being only thirty-two he was still young enough to attach reality to his conception. Himself the immaculate aristocrat, it astonished him—though it shouldn’t have—to find that Paine arrived at much the same conclusions out of experience that he, Jefferson, had gathered out of philosophy and reading. But whereas Jefferson had dreamed enough democracy to make it real, he could never quite grasp the concept of revolution. For Paine it was the other way around, and his thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson’s ever could be. Listening to Paine read something of what he had written, Jefferson wondered whether Paine knew what devils he was loosing upon the quiet eighteenth-century world wherein they lived.
Paine read hoarsely and self-consciously, ashamed before Jefferson:
“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province or a Kingdom; but of a continent—at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.…”
There was no style; it came forth as raucously as the preaching of a Methodist minister, and it struck with frantic hammer blows. A man could memorize words like those and drive his plow or hammer to the rhythm—
“O! Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”
Jefferson didn’t smile; a working man who cribbed from the Bible all he knew of style, who in the terms of a backwoods preacher roared a new creed for mankind, nevertheless said something no one else dared to say outright.
“What are you going to call it?” Jefferson asked.
“I think, common sense. That’s all it is.”
Word of Paine’s project got around, and people would say, “That’s common sense.” They would say, “He is preaching dissolution and hatred and revolt. Separation from the mother country.” Or, “Another common sense,” when someone spoke a word for the independence of the thirteen colonies.
A little book to show men what to think.
“Of course, separation in time,” old Ben Franklin said to him one day. “But be careful, Paine, be careful.”
He carried the manuscript around with him, crumpled, ink-stained paper, and sitting in a tavern with a mug of rum, he would write, correct, write again, smudge and blot and scrape together the future of America.
“Is it still common sense?” he’d be asked.
He wove the Bible into what he was writing. To the devil with the sophisticates of the city, he told himself. The man with the plow is the man with the gun, and the man with the plow reads and believes only one book. So he took from the Bible whatever he could whenever he could, and wove it into the rest. One night in a coffee house, having had a little too much, he read aloud. Of course, it was common sense, and he could draw a crowd, and it was very well put that the devil can quote scripture.
“To hell with all of you and all of you be damned!” he roared at the well-dressed, well-paunched Philadelphia merchants. And then, going home that night, he was set upon by half a dozen young toughs, his manuscript torn to shreds, himself rolled in the mud and beaten, his pants removed and a lash laid twenty or thirty times over his behind.
He kept his lips tight about it, and when Aitken came to him and said he might have a hint as to who the assailants were, Paine simply shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter. The few pages they tore up I know by heart.”
“But you, man, you!”
“I’ll live,” Paine said briefly.
The Reverend Jared Heath of the Society of Friends put it to Paine in a different fashion.
Heath, a small, moist-eyed man, said to Paine with utter sincerity, “Thomas, thee know not what thee do.”
“And exactly what am I doing that I don’t know?” Paine demanded.
“Thee are setting brother against brother and father against son and workman against employer with this writing of independence. Who, Thomas, speaks for independence? Thee should know that not the good people, not the considerate, not the gentle, but the discontented, those who make mock of God, the foreigners among us. Thee are one of us, yet thee write to plunge us into bloodshed.”
“I am one of many things,” Paine said wearily, not wanting to hurt this little man who evoked memories of his father, his uncles, of the old meeting house at Thetford.
“Come to us and pray and thee will see light.”
The summer past, the leaves turning red and brown and yellow as they rustled over the cobbled streets of Philadelphia, the cold clean winds blowing from the northwest, Paine still scraped at his paper. The thing was done or never done; he didn’
t know. He had written a little book to make men see the thing clearly, and it asked for independence. With deliberate hatred, he had torn apart the whole conception of monarchy. He had pointed out how long man had been nailed to the cross, and in words a farmer could understand begged for a good new world in this good new land. He had even tried his hand at a form of government. But always he harped on a single fact, that regardless of the pain, the torment, and the bloodshed, here must be a new and independent country.
He wrote on the first page, as if purging himself, “Common Sense, written by an Englishman.”
And then it was done, a heap of scribbled-over paper. No one would read it and probably no one would print it, but it was for the doing that Paine worked.
He was tired and listless, not left even with a desire to be drunk. Fascinated by the cool change of season, he wandered lazily through the narrow streets of Old Philadelphia, sniffing the winds that blew from the wide and grave and mysterious west. Never in England came such a change of season, sharp and clean, the air washing over a whole continent to thunder at the tidewater wanderers fled from the old world.
He discovered, so short was the memory of men, even for a ribald jest, that few now remembered he was Common Sense, and fewer poked fun at him. He was left alone, and often he said to himself that was just as well.
He let Aitken read his finished manuscript; no animosity was left between them, and Aitken, glasses perched on his nose, followed the scrawl carefully and considerately. Finally he said, “It’s no’ a bad thing, Thomas, but, my lad, it’s muckle dangerous.”
“If anyone reads it,” Paine said.
“I will no’ publish it, but why na’ take it to Bobby Bell, who’s a fool for such matters.”
“If you think so,” Paine nodded.
Bell was a Scotsman too, hatchet-faced, with ink-grimed hands. He said a good morning to Paine, and then took the manuscript, leaned against his counter and began to read. Paine dropped to a chair, closed his eyes, dozed a little, opened his eyes to see that the Scotsman had started over at the front page. His face never moved, never changed expression as he went through the manuscript again. Then he folded it carefully, laid it down on the counter, and placed a paperweight on it to hold it in place.
“You don’t want it,” Paine said.
“No-o—”
Paine began to rise but the Scotsman said, “Be in no hurry. I canna guarantee a profit, but I will set type and make a book of it. A man canna say will sell or will no’ sell, but I lean to standing up to what’s mine. They’re good, clear sentiments.”
“I don’t want any money,” Paine said. “I wrote this because I had to, that’s all. If you make money, you can have it; I don’t want it.”
“I have no argument with a man who desires to throw a penny in my lap.”
“Then you’ll print it.”
“That I will,” Bell said somberly.
And then Paine rose and left the shop as casually as he had entered.
7
COMMON SENSE
DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, a young Philadelphia physician who had some time since decided that more than physical ills ailed mankind, told Ben Franklin how Bell had cooled toward the idea of Paine’s book. “I think he was afraid,” Rush said. “I don’t blame him. Like a hundred thousand others, he doesn’t know on what side his bread is buttered; he has other things to think about, all men have, I suppose.
“But, God, the more I think of it, the more I wonder how those farmers at Lexington had the guts to stand up to it.”
“Did you read the book?” Franklin asked.
“Yes.”
“And did you like it?”
“It’s not something a man likes or dislikes. Neither is gunpowder, nor bleeding.”
“Of course, you got Bell to go ahead?” Franklin said quietly.
“Was that wrong? He owes me, and I suppose I put my finger on him where it hurt a little.”
“Things are not right and wrong any more,” Franklin reflected, almost sadly. “We go ahead, and that’s all.”
“Of course, they’re right and wrong!”
“Of course,” Franklin shrugged. “It was right for kings to rule the world for a thousand years. It was right for little people to suffer and die. It was so right for men to be slaves that there was never a need for chains.” He added, after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m sorry I am an old man. I would like to see—”
“If you want to read the book,” Rush said, “it will be off the presses in a few days. You’ve probably seen parts of it in manuscript. That man Paine certainly isn’t reticent.”
“Bring me a copy,” Franklin nodded, reflecting that he had had a hand in opening Pandora’s box, almost boyishly eager to see what Paine, who would shake the world apart, had to say.
From the press and just sewn together, it still smelled of ink and smudged as Paine held it in his hands, a thin book called “Common Sense, written by an Englishman,” with big block letters on the cover, sticky as Paine opened it.
“Done,” Bell said.
Paine told him, “I don’t want you to suffer for this,” and Bell shrugged. “I’ll want to buy a few copies,” said Paine.
Bell nodded.
“To show them to my friends.”
“Ye may.”
“You’ll give it to me a little cheaper than the regular price?” Paine remarked, not able to keep a note of anxiety out of his voice, his hand in his pocket holding all the money he had in the world.
“I may.”
“It makes a pretty book,” said Paine.
Consigned to Baltimore by stage, the package had neither the sender’s name nor the contents marked on it, only the destination, the shop of Marcus Leed, a small bookseller. But Bell, to purchase the driver’s silence, had given him a dozen copies to sell himself at two shillings to whoever would buy. In the coach, the passengers took one to share among them and while away the hours with—fat, bespectacled Parson Amos Culwoodie, Methodist free preacher, reading sonorously:
“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy.”—The parson had always felt as much.—“It first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required—” Jacob Stutz, the miller, sitting alongside the parson, knew that if man doesn’t live by bread alone, bread at least is as necessary as anything else, and now wondered what king on earth could do a simple grading of flour.
A long journey and a noisy one. The parson reaffirmed his position as God’s right hand man when he read, “How came the king by a power the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check?”
“How indeed?” Mrs. Roderick Clewes asked.
The parson took off his hat in deference to a lady. “There is no divine right in man,” he stated decisively.
“None?”
“None, I tell you, madam. For a minister, a call perhaps, an inspiration, an unfolding of the darkness, a nearness to God. But divine right—that, madam, I assure you, is dispensed by Satan.”
In the old Brackmeyer Coffee House by Dr. Rush’s arrangement were met David Rittenhouse, James Cannon, Christopher Marshall, Ludwig Rees, and Amberton St. Allen, a strange company of the high and the low, united by a desperate feeling that now there was no turning back. It gave them a feeling of romance, a feeling of living high and swiftly and gloriously, to know that when the redcoats came to Philadelphia they would be among the first hanged. Withal, theirs was an intellectual approach, and their god was Ben Franklin, not the Adams cousins. When Rush told them he had called them together to read a pamphlet, they nodded, called for drinks, and set themselves to listen.
“Never mind who wrote this,” Rush said, and then he read slowly and meticulously for almost three hours, stopping now and then to answer a brief question, but toward the latter part of his reading holding his listeners in a rapt silence.
“It’s called Common Sense,” he said when he had finished.
�
�Of course, it’s Paine’s thing,” Rittenhouse nodded.
“That’s right.”
“If this be treason—” someone paraphrased.
“You don’t realize—it’s so damned insidious.”
“How much?”
“Two shillings.”
“Well, it ought to be less.”
“You think people will buy it?”
“Is there anyone who won’t? The man’s a devil and a genius.”
“No, he’s a peasant. Have you ever seen his hands, like slabs of beef. He’s a peasant, and that’s why he understands us, because we’re a nation of peasants and shopkeepers and mechanics. He comes here a year ago and he knows what’s in our guts. He’s not writing for you and me, but for the man at the plow and the bench, and, God, how he flatters them, crawls inside of them, tickles them, seduces them, talks their own language, says to them: Isn’t this reasonable? Isn’t this common sense? Why haven’t you done this long ago? Bathe the world in the blood of tyrants! You and I and all the rest, why are we slaves when we can be free? Is he Christ or the devil? I don’t know. I know, after hearing that thing read, there will be no peace for a long time.”
“For how long?”
“Not ten years—maybe a hundred, two hundred. Maybe never—I don’t know if men were made to be slaves or free.”
Abraham Marah was a trader with the Indians, a lonely man, a strong man but black-eyed and black-visaged. His name when he came to the country as a little boy had been Abraham ben Asher, but they called him Marah because he was bitter, and as he came of age and lived more and more in the dark forests he called himself Abraham Marah, after the new fashion. He was a Jew, but at the synagogue he was known as a rebel. “I’m a free man,” he would say, “and God has done nothing for me.”
But he wasn’t slow with money when they asked for contributions. As they said, What use had he for money? With no home, no wife, no possessions but the pack on his back and his long Pennsylvania squirrel gun, he would roam on for months at a time. He knew the Indians—the Shawnee, the Miami, the Wyandot, and the Huron—and they knew him. Fur hunters they all were, and he could come back from six months in the dark forest with a fortune in pelts on his donkeys. Now, starting out again, he came to Bell and bought twenty copies of Paine’s book.
