Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  Paine nodded. Slowly and painfully, he had been coming around to the same point of view. “The strength was always with the people,” he said.

  “Of course—firearms don’t change that. But there was never, in this world, a technique for revolution. There was a technique for tyranny and strength implemented it, but always the strength of a few. The strength of many is revolution, but curiously enough mankind has gone through several thousand years of slavery without realizing that fact. The little men have pleaded, but when before have they stood up with arms in their hands and said, This is mine!”

  “There were never the circumstances before.”

  “Perhaps. It’s true that we have here a nation of armed men who know how to use their arms; we have a Protestant tradition of discussion as opposed to autocracy; we have some notion of the dignity of man; and above all we have land, land enough for everyone. Those are fortunate circumstances, but now we must learn technique. The man with the iron glove has held this world for God knows how many thousands of years, and in how short a time do you suppose we can take it back from him—not to mention holding it?”

  “I don’t like to think about that.”

  “You must. We are learning a bloody, dreadful business, this technique of revolution, but we must learn it well. You wrote a little book, and because of that men will know why they fight. You wanted independence, and we’re going to have it, mark my word. Six months ago you were rolled in the dirt because people knew what you were writing; two weeks ago a man in New York was almost tarred and feathered because he planned to publish an answer to Common Sense. That’s not morality; that’s strength, the same kind of strength the tyrants used, only a thousand times more powerful. Now we must learn how to use that strength, how to control it. We need leaders, a program, a purpose, but above all we need revolutionists.”

  Paine nodded.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Join Washington,” Paine said.

  “I think you’re right. Keep your eyes open, and don’t be discouraged. We are a free people, but we are only a few generations away from the slaves. We will whimper and cry and groan, and we will want to give up. We are not an orderly people, Paine, and I don’t think we will make good soldiers. In a little while we may forget what we are fighting for and throw away our muskets. Remember that—always remember that.”

  Fame sat uneasily on his shoulders, and suddenly Philadelphia was repugnant to him, a fat, satisfied town that talked eternally, criticized vehemently, and did almost nothing at all. On the streets and in the coffee houses, where Paine’s book was fast becoming another Bible, talk of independence was free and easy, but in the Assembly the eastern delegates still held out against it. The frontier delegates stalked the streets with black faces, but there was nothing they could do.

  A banquet was given for Paine; he did not have the money for a new coat, for lace cuffs, and he would neither beg nor borrow. He came as he was, shabby, without even a wig, sitting glumly at the table, thinking, “I told Franklin I was going, I told Rush—why don’t I go?” But it didn’t matter so much; the armies were sitting idle. Of course, give a thing a chance and it will blow over. On the table, as a centerpiece, was a monster pasteboard replica of Common Sense.

  “Oh, the glory that this stranger has given our cause!” said Thaddeus Green, the toastmaster. “Oh, words of his that are fire, live forever!” Green had come in his militia uniform, blue and yellow. “Will not freemen lay down their lives gladly?” he cried.

  Paine was getting drunk. He drank thirty-two toasts, and lay with his head in his plate, his mouth drooling. Almost everyone else was drunk, snoring, telling dirty stories, pawing the waitresses, dirtying their fine and fanciful uniforms, their lace and silk, shouting suddenly:

  “God damn King George!”

  “Liberty forever.”

  “Like this,” Paine muttered. “Here the glory of free men.”

  Jefferson had asked him to come. He sat there in a corner of the room, feeling like a fool, his hands on his knees, while Jefferson explained how Washington had reacted toward reading the book.

  “You’ve done a great thing for your country—” Jefferson said.

  Paine could not help thinking how empty and stupid words were. What was his country? What was he to these suave, aristocratic, lace-draped intellectual democrats? Why did he always feel like a fool?

  “Naturally, you said what we’ve all been thinking,” Jefferson went on. “What we’ve been saying too. Yet you have to say a thing so men will understand it and comprehend it, even a man like Washington, and he’s no fool, you understand. Your book says it—and to everyone. Now we’re committed to independence.”

  “I was waiting,” Paine said. “I was never really certain.”

  “And what will you do now that you are satisfied—and I trust you are?”

  “Join the army.”

  “Is that wise?”

  Paine shrugged; to have his decision weighed so, back and forth, with the supercilious attitude that no man could serve this movement by taking a gun in his hand, but only by sitting here in Philadelphia and mouthing words, was breaking down both his nerve and his determination. Slowly, he was becoming aware that these great and important men of the colonies, even Jefferson, whose reason was a creed and a religion, looked upon him as a sort of performing animal, a peasant to represent the numberless peasants who would make up the army of rebellion, a clever rabble rouser to be used for their purposes.

  When in the newspapers someone attacked the revolutionary movement, the conception of an independent America, and Paine answered hoarsely and vehemently, there was a chorus of polite handclapping.

  “We’re in committee now,” Jefferson said, “Franklin, Adams, Sherman, Livingston—I am making the draft of the declaration, purely and simply for Independence. I want you to know that I am using Common Sense, that I am proud to.”

  “But not proud enough to include me in committee,” Paine thought, yet with a sort of satisfaction that he was out of that, that he could use himself according to his own desires. And he said, “When do you expect to have a vote on it?”

  “In July, perhaps.”

  “And then it will be the United States of America?”

  This time Jefferson smiled and shrugged. “We owe a great deal to you,” he nodded.

  “Nothing.”

  Handling the future with assurance, Jefferson said easily, “Remember, Paine, if out of this comes something real and concrete, a republican state, you will not find it ungrateful.”

  Then it was done, and the bright new world was made, and in the teeming, excited city of Philadelphia there were few who doubted that the people would rise to support this grandiloquent, rhetorical, generalized declaration of independence. Glory is born in July, 1776, they told each other. They paraded, singing that fantastic bit of doggerel that had attached itself to the army of the revolution, Yankee Doodle went to London Town—and who knew but that they would all be there? Invade Canada? Why not? And why not England? And why not the world, to make this the new Christianity? Of course, when Jefferson’s first draft of the declaration had been submitted to the Continental Congress, Benjamin Harrison leaped up and roared, “There is but one word in this paper which I approve, and that is the word Congress.” But on the other hand, hadn’t Caesar Rodney ridden eighty miles in twelve hours, killing horses, just to be on the floor of the house on July fourth and sign the document?

  Paine was honored; hurt and honored, when a few days before the presentation of the document Jefferson had come to him with a sudden tenderness and said:

  “Let me read you this.”

  “Read it if you want to,” Paine said.

  “It’s at the end, the summing up, and you did it. My God, Thomas, we don’t know our debt to you. History is like bad housekeeping entered into an account book.”

  “Why don’t you get on with it?” Paine thought.

  “We, therefore,” Jefferson read, “the repres
entatives of the United States of America—” He glanced up at the slope-shouldered, unkempt man who had given him that phrase. “How does it sound?”

  “Read it!”

  “—in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these united colonies are, and of good right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the states of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.…”

  “Well, it’s done,” Paine said.

  “Yes—”

  Paine was thinking that now there was nothing left to keep him here, he could go away.

  Roberdeau, general of Pennsylvania militia, was a portly man with a face as red as a beet, a huge pair of haunches, and a glorious uniform of blue and yellow. A successful merchant, he was quite sure he would be an even more successful soldier, and once he had decided to lead a detachment to Amboy, south and west of Staten Island, he was satisfied that General Washington’s troubles were over. He offered Paine the post as his personal secretary. The Associators, as the militia called themselves, had drilled for a good many months now, and Roberdeau pointed out to Paine that to be with this brigade was something of a signal honor.

  “I’ll come,” Paine said. “I don’t want any commission. If I can serve you as a secretary, well enough.”

  “Such things as commissions can be arranged. I would, personally, prefer to see you as a major. More dignity in such a post than as a captain or a lieutenant. Aside from that, have you a uniform?”

  Paine confessed that he hadn’t.

  “Important, my boy, important. Only with uniformity can we inject into the ranks a certain military tradition, such as gleamed like a halo around the great Marlborough and Frederick of Prussia.”

  “I’ll do without one,” Paine said, thinking of how those who had seen Washington’s army reported that there was not a uniform to a brigade.

  “If it’s a matter of money …”

  “It’s not a matter of money,” Paine said.

  Bell had given him fifty copies of Common Sense; that, with his rusty old musket, powder, shot, a water bottle, and a bag of cornmeal, made up Paine’s luggage. He trudged with the rest, partly out of desire, partly because he could not afford a horse. Roberdeau, who took Paine’s abasement as a personal affront, did not talk to him for hours at a time; Paine hardly noticed that. Nothing else mattered but that now, after long last, he was marching shoulder to shoulder with his own kind, the shopkeepers, the clerks and mechanics, the weavers, carpenters, craftsmen. For the time, it was entirely emotional; they had met no enemy, seen nothing of war. And they knew nothing of it except what they had heard from New England. And in Massachusetts, hadn’t American losses been fantastically small?

  The night of the first bivouac, Paine sat at the fire, heating his corn gruel, tensely aware of himself, unable to speak, tears of joy in his eyes. The voices of the militiamen were loud, somewhat self-conscious, bright. It was:

  “Comrade, a light!”

  “Share my gruel—porridge for bacon?”

  “The devil with that, comrade, I have enough for both of us.”

  “Citizen, how about a toast?”

  There was a wagon full of rum in iron-bound casks. Roberdeau, patting his huge paunch, had one broken open. They toasted the Congress, Washington, Lee, Jefferson, who had written it all down so prettily, old Ben Franklin. A clear, youthful tenor began to sing:

  “Oh, the pretty skies of Pennsylvania,

  Oh, the meadows sylvan green,

  Oh, the bluebird and the nightingale,

  Oh, the countries, ’mong the countries,

  Our sylvania is the Queen.”

  Paine could hardly carry a tune, but he sang with the rest. The artillery men sat on their brace of cannon, swaying back and forth, keeping time with their ramrods. The fires trailed a curtain of sparks toward the sky, and a sweet, cool wind blew from the west. This was all Paine had ever thought of or dreamed of, the common men of the world marching together, shoulder to shoulder, guns in their hands, love in their hearts.

  For Paine, it was an almost mystical fulfillment, and he said to himself, “Who can measure the forces started here? Men of good will march together and know their own strength. With the power we have, what can stop us, or even slow us? What can’t we achieve, what new worlds, what glories, what promises!”

  But on the next day, their sublimity began to be more commonplace. A comrade is a comrade, but a blister on one’s heel is not to be sneezed at. The glorious cause of independence remained a cause glorious, but the muskets grew no lighter. Most of the firelocks they carried were brand-new, the product of Anson Schmidt, a Front Street gunsmith whose theories were violently opposed to those of the back-country craftsmen. In the Pennsylvania hinterland, a slim, light, long-barreled rifle had been developed. It threw a lead slug the size of a large green pea with amazing accuracy and outranged by at least a hundred yards any other weapon known at the time. But Schmidt reasoned, and rightly, what was the use of such a rifle to a man who was not a marksman? He developed his own gun, the Patriot Lady, he called it, wide of bore, bound with iron, and heavy as a small cannon. It could be loaded with anything, shot, nails, glass, wire, stones, and at thirty yards it was brutally, effective. Its great drawback was that it required a strong man to carry it.

  The militia were not strong. For several hours they carried their muskets, and then someone got the idea of heaving his weapon into a supply wagon. Soon the supply wagons were groaning with the weight of a hundred muskets, and Roberdeau, blue with rage, screamed what kind of an army was this marching without arms?

  “Well enough for you on your horse, fatty,” a private told the general.

  “God damn you, you’ll have a hundred lashes for that!”

  “And who’ll lay them on?”

  Roberdeau backed down, but assured the man that he would write a charge to the Continental Congress. The men were tired, begrimed with sweat, surly; and it was too early in the campaign to look for trouble. Since Paine was the secretary, Roberdeau put it to him, instructing him to write the following to the military committee:

  “Whereas one, Alexander Hartson, indulged in treasonable talk—”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Paine interrupted.

  “No?”

  “His talk wasn’t treasonable. It would be better to have him whipped.”

  “I think I know how to order my brigade,” Roberdeau said. “Write what I tell you to; that’s why you’re here. I don’t need instructions in military ethics from any two-pence scrivener.”

  “Very well,” Paine nodded.

  There was a tall, loose-limbed man who took to walking alongside Paine. His name was Jacob Morrison, and he came from the wild and beautiful Wyoming Valley. His wife and child had died of smallpox, and he, sick of living alone in the dark woods, had come to Philadelphia, taken work as a hand in a flour mill, and there joined the Associators. Armed with a long rifle, clad in buckskin leggings and a hunting shirt, he almost alone in that motley group of militia appeared fitted for the business on which they were embarked. He took a liking to Paine, if for no other reason than that Paine continued to carry his own musket. He said to him once, in his slow, back-country drawl:

  “Citizen, what do you think of our little war?”

  “Things start slowly,” Paine said.

  “Yes, but I reckon I seldom seen a seedier lot of fighting men.”

  “
Well, give them time—you don’t make soldiers over night. And you don’t make a new world in one day.”

  “You’re English, aren’t you?” Morrison said. “What got you into this?”

  Paine shrugged.

  “For me, I don’t give a damn,” the backwoodsman drawled. “I got nothing to lose. But, Lord, there’s troubled times coming—”

  That night Roberdeau took a new tack, changing from bullying to cajoling. He broke open an extra cask of rum, and announced to the men:

  “We have with us here, citizens, a most illustrious patriot, the man who with words of fire wrote Common Sense. He has consented to say a few words to us concerning the cause for which we are determined to give our lives. Citizen Thomas Paine!”

  Paine wasn’t prepared. He stood up sheepishly, stumbled into the light of a fire, and began to talk, very haltingly at first—“We are embarked on a deed of small men, and that’s what we are, small men, citizens, common people. We are going to find it hard, and grumble and complain, and some of us will go home. I think that’s how a revolution starts—”

  Their permanent bivouac was at Amboy, close to where the Raritan River flows into lower New York Bay. Across the river were the hills of Staten Island, and beyond, on Manhattan, a terrible drama was being enacted. Washington’s orders were to hold New York with the rabble of militia he had under his command, twenty thousand in number, but none of them trained soldiers—New England Yankee farmers for the most part, some Pennsylvanians, some Jersey troops, a good many Virginians, and several brigades of Maryland troops, the latter the best of the lot. But to hold New York with that raggle-taggle mob was as absurd as it was impossible. Each day, more British transports and ships of the line sailed into the harbor, disgorging thousands and thousands of trained regulars and Hessians onto Staten Island. Meanwhile, Washington had split his army, placing half his men in Brooklyn to stave off a flank attack that might isolate him on the slim ridge of Manhattan. To counter this move, the British shifted part of their army to Long Island, and on the night of August 27, General Howe launched his attack. They found a weak spot in the American lines, captured a few sleeping sentries, flanked half of Washington’s army, and then, holding it in pincer jaws, proceeded methodically to destroy it.