Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  Only through his own cool courage and the aid of a brigade of Marblehead fishermen was Washington able to evacuate what was left of his shattered army to New York. And there, almost before he had time to reorganize, the British attacked again, this time determined to destroy what was left of the colonial army.

  They came near to accomplishing that purpose. Landing on Manhattan both from the East River and the Upper Bay, they again attempted to close the pincers, driving the routed, panic-stricken colonials before them. It became a wild footrace, in which an utterly demoralized mob of militia threw away their weapons and ran like rabbits for the fortified line which the Americans still held where One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is today. Whole brigades were cut off by the Hessians, ripped to pieces with cold steel, made prisoner; men cowered in barns, haylofts, thickets; others drowned themselves trying to swim across the Hudson and reach the Jersey shore. Only through a miracle did a good part of the troops which had held lower New York escape. In a few weeks the twenty thousand had been reduced to less than fifteen thousand.

  And during this time, the Philadelphia Associators made themselves very small at Amboy. More than enough news of what was happening in New York filtered into their lines, and the only concrete result was desertion. It was a thing of the past to call one’s neighbor comrade, and as for citizen—

  Paine had pleaded with General Roberdeau, with Colonel Plaxton, “What are we doing here? Over there in New York, the whole good hope of mankind is being smashed, and what are we doing here?”

  “Our duty, which is to garrison Amboy.”

  “Christ, no! We could march up through Jersey and cross over at Fort Lee and join Washington. Better yet, we could cross the Raritan and attack the British where they’re weakest, in Staten Island. Or we could raid over into Bayonne—”

  Roberdeau smiled condescendingly. “You’re a writer, Paine, a dreamer, shall we say. The hard military facts—”

  “God damn it, sir, what do you know about military facts?”

  Plaxton blew up with rage, but Roberdeau only pouted and spread his arms helplessly. “First the others, now you, turning against me, talking treason.”

  “Treason! My God, sir, is everything treason? Isn’t it treason to sit here on our behinds?”

  “Orders—”

  “From whom? Did the orders take into account that Washington’s army would be shattered, that we should lose New York? Has any man in your command fired a gun yet or faced an enemy?”

  Fat, his face jelly-like in its impotence, Roberdeau blubbered his appeal to Plaxton, the slim, dandified gentleman, one of the Penn family, sneering and bored at the two of them:

  “Is my duty my duty? Tell me? Am I to blame that Washington’s army is driven from New York? Am I to blame that instead of soldiers they give me shop clerks?”

  Then there were the desertions; Philadelphia was not far enough away, and each night a few of the militia slipped out of camp. Almost no discipline was left, and for the most part the officers were drunk; if the general objected, they laughed in his face. Paine stormed, pleaded, exhorted; and strangely, the militia did not take offense at him; rather, they became like schoolboys being scolded. When he sat by a fire and read to them from Common Sense, they listened, fascinated, intrigued, and then for a moment he could fill them with passion:

  “Do you understand, this is for us, for you and me, for our children! We are the beginning, and we are making a new world!”

  But it didn’t take; they were homesick, frightened, bewildered by the reports from New York. If the British had cut to pieces Washington’s great army, which had already been under fire at Boston, what would happen with raw, untried militia?

  “Listen to me, comrades!”

  Now they hated the word. What did words mean when words led only to death. The revolution was a farce; and it was doubtless true that the British hanged all rebels—or gave them to the mercy of the Hessians.

  As Jacob Morrison said, there should be at least twenty who could be counted on; he had been sounding them out, and he told Paine, “In this cursed Jersey, there must be at least a few hundred others we could pick up, enough to make a raiding party. I seen too many like Roberdeau, who is no good, and in a little while he’ll go home—mark my word.”

  “I suppose he’ll go home,” Paine shrugged.

  “Then what’s to hold us back? The Continental Congress?” asked Morrison derisively. Paine sat down and put his face in his hands; his head ached. He told Morrison:

  “It’s mutiny, you know.”

  Morrison asked him if he wanted to get drunk.

  “All right.”

  There was no longer a pretense made of guarding the rum. They had a quart each, and staggered around the camp, roaring obscene songs at the top of their lungs. Like a helpless schoolmarm, Roberdeau called them names until Morrison ran at him with a bayonet. Paine stood on a supply cart, swaying, exhorting the militia, who were not entirely sober themselves, moving them and himself to maudlin tears, watching out of the corner of his eyes how Morrison staggered around, brandishing the bayonet, finally falling off the cart.

  But when it came down to facts, the next day, they could not find twenty in the camp who would join them, not ten and not even one. Roberdeau, Plaxton, and a few other militia officers held a council of war, the outcome of which was a decision to march back to Philadelphia; and when the Associators heard the decision read, they cheered for a full fifteen minutes. Paine and Morrison sat on a fallen tree trunk, their firelocks on their knees, and watched the camp break up. It didn’t take long, nor did Roberdeau speak to them; only when the Associators began to march did a few militiamen glance back and wave. Morrison began to hum softly, and Paine sighed and studied his rusty musket as if he had never seen it before.

  “Not that I give a damn,” Morrison said, “and I suppose they have something to go back for. The little man, Tom, is a timid rabbit—don’t let it stick in your throat.”

  “No—”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  Paine nodded, and silently Morrison passed him a leathern flask of rum. They rocked it back and forth for a little while, and then when it was empty, they threw it away. “Ye that love mankind,” Paine quoted, and Morrison said, “Shut up!”

  “Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!”

  “God damn you, shut up!”

  “All right,” Paine nodded. “Only let’s get out of here—let’s get out of this damned place and not see it again.”

  They crossed the Raritan and set out to walk to Fort Lee on the west bank of the Hudson River, some thirty miles to the north. There was a garrison and there was a place in Washington’s army for two men who held onto their guns. They took the old pike to Elizabethtown, trudging along through the cool September days, their guns over their shoulders, two left from all the Philadelphia militia, a tall backwoodsman and a slope-shouldered, broad-necked Englishman, profession: revolutionist, but just two of all the raggle-taggle that drifted along the road—deserters, farmers, cowboys, milkmaids, and even a British patrol now and then to send them diving into the underbrush. They had no money, but the weather was good, and they could sleep in a field and roast sweet corn over a fire.

  For Tom Paine, there was a quality of relief in the disbanding of the Philadelphians; the weak went and a few of the strong were left, and he had never had a comrade before like this tall, slow-spoken Pennsylvanian. He read to him from Common Sense, and respect became a bond between them. Morrison told how his wife and child had died, leaving him alone in the dark forest, and trudging along they shared their loneliness and knew each other’s thoughts. In those times, the flatlands of Jersey were not covered with smoking factories and an endless maze of railroads, but between the pine barrens, the sulphur swampland stretched for miles and miles, inhabited only by flocks of whirring birds, by snakes and frogs, desolate by daytime, but shining with an unearthly beauty at dawn and twilight.

  Once they passed E
lizabethtown, they walked for hours through this silent, stretching plain, for Paine so reminiscent of the British fens. He spoke to Morrison of the things he had seen as a boy in the gin hell of London; hope which had been so low in them rose higher, and the calm spaces of the swamps gave them new courage. Now they laughed at Roberdeau.

  And then Morrison was shot through the head by a British sentry they stumbled over in the dark; the sentry, more frightened than Paine, ran away, and Paine, who had heard his first shot of war, took his friend’s rifle and went on.

  His way lost, his clothes soaked and dirty, he came into the light of a campfire where two deserters sat, boys of seventeen who snatched up their muskets and faced him like animals at bay:

  “Who in hell are you?”

  “Paine—Tom Paine.”

  “And what do you want, god damn you?”

  “The way to Fort Lee, that’s all,” he said calmly, observing with speculative inward curiosity that he was not afraid of these two terrified children, not afraid but only deeply saddened and coming awake to the stuff his dreams were made of.

  “That way,” they said, grinning, easier once they had him covered and saw that he was alone.

  “Do we still hold it?”

  They shook with laughter that was partly hysterical. “We hold it,” one of them said.

  “Why did you run away?”

  “You go to hell, you bastard, that’s none of your business!”

  “Why?”

  And then the other lifted his shirt to show the fresh, raw marks of a lashing.

  Like a low-crowned hat, Fort Lee sat on top of the Palisades, opposite Fort Washington on the Manhattan shore. The one was named after Charles Lee, the Englishman who had sold his services to the colonies for a substantial sum, who had been a professional soldier all his life, who lived on his own lush visions of glory; the other was named for a Virginia farmer who had blundered into the command of all the continental armies, and had, since August, been lashed by defeat after defeat. That farmer had already lost all of Manhattan to the enemy except Fort Washington and a few hundred acres of land surrounding it. He had been driven out of Manhattan and almost extinguished as a military factor at White Plains. He was now trying to regroup his shattered army and plan a campaign, and most of all make up his mind whether or not to abandon Fort Washington.

  General Nathanael Greene, the handsome young Quaker in command of Fort Lee, believed that both points, facing each other across the Hudson River, could be held as long as was necessary. Rightly enough, he considered them a gate to the Hudson, and the Hudson a gate to the colonies. Now, at Fort Lee, he was informed that a man had arrived in camp who called himself Tom Paine.

  “Paine?” Greene asked. He had a book, a small Bible called Common Sense, worn to pieces with two dozen readings. “Well, bring him here. Paine, you say? Of course, bring him here.”

  “I know you and I don’t know you,” Greene said to Paine, when they stood face to face, the one tall, sunburned, handsome and dapper in his buff and blue which he had had made in the style of his commander’s Virginia militia uniform, the other broad and stocky, hook-nosed, hair in a knot and cheeks with three days’ beard, his old clothes stained with dirt and blood. “You’re Common Sense, aren’t you?”

  Paine nodded, and they shook hands. Greene, excited as a boy, called over his aides, introduced them, ran into his tent and brought out his own battered copy of Paine’s book, ruffled the pages, smiling and trying to believe his eyes that Paine was here in front of him.

  “You don’t understand, of course—you don’t know what this has meant to us. Everything, do you believe me?”

  “I want to.”

  “Good. You know we’ve been beaten, no use trying to hide that. We were driven out of Brooklyn and we were driven out of New York. All we hold in Manhattan is the fort, yet we have hopes of getting it all back, not military hopes entirely, but here, what you’ve given us, something to chew on and bite into, something solid and substantial that they can’t take away from us. I’ve bought seventy-five copies myself and forced men to read them who have never opened a book in their lives—”

  Paine shook his head dazedly.

  “And now you’re here. That’s the wonder of it, your being here. I swear, sir, I’d rather have you than a regiment, and the general will say the same thing when he meets you.”

  For a day, Paine was left alone. He told Greene that was what he wanted, to be left alone, to walk around the camp, to clean himself up, to think. There were a good many things he had to think about, he told Greene. Well, naturally, you’d expect that. “Do whatever you want to,” Greene said. “When you’re ready, we’ll talk.”

  Paine wandered through the fort leisurely, always coming back to the high bluff where he could lean on the parapet of tree trunks and look across the dancing little waves of the Hudson to the green, wooded hills of Manhattan. Actually, Lee was more a bivouac than a fortification, poorly protected, but amazingly picturesque in its high setting over the river. Paine found talking to the men easier than he had expected; they were Yankees, many of them, from the little villages of middle New England, but it had been noised about the camp that he was the author of Common Sense, and they were pleased to find him as simple as they were. Working men themselves, they recognized in him all the signs of a man who has used his hands unsparingly, the sloping shoulders, the heavy palms and short fingers, the thick, muscular forearms. They talked to him about his book, and he was amazed to find how keenly they could analyze material facts, the trade of the colonies, the potential for ship building, for weaving, for manufacture. Ten minutes after meeting him, they would be relating tales that Greene could not have dragged out of them with torture; they told him about their parents, their wives, children, farms. So many of them were boys under twenty, red-cheeked children who knew whole pages of his book by heart.

  “You remember, sir?” they would say.

  And he wouldn’t remember. Here was none of the comrade, the citizen, the self-conscious dramatization of the Associators, but rather a subdued realization of what it meant to face the best troops in the world and be defeated constantly.

  “Yes, sir, you’ll find it mighty pertinent,” and they would go on to quote him. “Now that matter of delegates to Congress, as you put it, I wouldn’t take exception to it, Mr. Paine, but I might offer a mite of a suggestion. You speculate that Congress could choose a president—”

  They were argumentative and keen and alive, but their education didn’t include niceties. They were likely to pick their noses in a ruminative fashion, to chew tobacco and spit where it pleased them; they weren’t clean. They were an abomination to the Virginians and Marylanders, with whom they bickered and fought constantly, and they couldn’t get along with the Dutch.

  Paine gave away Morrison’s rifle. For himself, his old musket was good enough, and he was very doubtful of his ability to hit anything with it, even if he loaded with buckshot. He gave the long rifle to a Virginian who could use it.

  When Greene had heard from Paine the full story of the Associators, he nodded and said, without passion, “Of course, it isn’t the first time. That’s happened in half a dozen places. It’s happened with us, too, I suppose.”

  “They weren’t cowards,” Paine said.

  “Men aren’t cowards. It’s a balance; either it’s better to stay and fight, or it’s better to run away.”

  “They didn’t have any direction,” Paine said. “They were molded by certain things for God knows how many hundreds of years, and how could you unmold them overnight? And they didn’t have any leadership. Back in Philadelphia, Rush told me that revolution is a technique. What do we know about that technique?”

  “Nothing—”

  “And yet I can’t get used to the idea that the cause is doomed. Do you think it’s doomed?”

  Greene said no, but not with assurance.

  “No, of course, it’s not doomed.” Paine shook his head and rubbed his heavy fingers into his
brow. “Revolution is something new, we don’t know how new it is. I sometimes think that April last year a new era for the world began.” He asked Greene how long it would be, how many years, and Greene said he didn’t know, it might be twenty or a hundred years. They smiled at each other, Greene showing his large strong teeth, his blue eyes wrinkled in appreciation of the parts they both played in this curious comic opera. Paine was relieved to find someone saying what he had been thinking. Greene said he was glad that Paine was there.

  “It means very little,” Paine protested.

  “No, I’m trying to learn how to make a campaign, but what’s the good if they don’t know why they’re fighting?”

  “Do you think I can tell them?”

  “I think so,” Greene nodded.

  “All right.”

  “Do you want an officership?” Greene inquired. “It can be arranged, you know. A captaincy, easily; you could be a colonel or a major if you wish to—we have so many of them, God knows.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “In a way, it’s a matter of respect,” Greene said uncertainly.

  “If I can’t have their respect as Tom Paine, it’s no good to me.”

  “Yes—”

  “You see, all I can give them are reasons. I don’t know anything about fighting.”

  He was in Hackensack when Fort Washington fell, dropping the ripe plum of three thousand men into the hands of the British. At Hackensack, five miles inland from Fort Lee, there was a larger encampment of the ragged continental troops, Jersey and Pennsylvania men, undisciplined, a swaggering, dirty, wretched camp that gave Paine a desolate reminder of the Philadelphia militia. The bivouac was overrun by camp-followers, women of all ages in all the stages of decay. The men kept chickens and pigs and spent their time earning the undying hatred of the local farmers. Greene had said to him, “Go there and see whether you can make those swine understand why they’re fighting.”