Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  They worked together, setting and printing, and then they began to smile as they pulled copy after copy of the black, sticky manifesto that Paine had written on a drumhead.

  “It’s fire,” the editor said. “I’ve seen a lot of writing, but nothing that was hot as this.”

  “I hope so,” Paine agreed. “By God, I hope so!”

  He met Roberdeau in the street, and Roberdeau shook his hand and asked where was he staying.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Then come home with me.” It was strange how calm the general was in this panic-stricken city. “Come along.”

  “You have worries enough.”

  “No, come along.” Roberdeau was older and leaner, a shadow in back of his eyes that Paine had not noticed before. When asked about the Associators, he shook his head. He told Paine that then it had been a game.

  “Of course, I didn’t know. No one knew, I think. Is it all through with Washington?”

  Paine was able to smile now. “You don’t know him.”

  “No—I don’t.” He told Paine that he had read The Crisis. “Do you know what it made me feel? That I was rotten—all through rotten.”

  Paine nodded; he had felt much the same, writing it.

  “It must be printed, you know, as a pamphlet.”

  “Nobody has guts enough for that now. I asked Bell, and Bell ran from the city with the Congress. The printers who stay are going to climb a fence and stay there.” Paine fingered his neck and said ruefully, “You know, I begin to think of a rope myself. It doesn’t matter so much with me, I have nothing to lose and nobody would care a lot—but to be hanged by the neck—”

  “I know,” Roberdeau shrugged. “Let’s see about having it printed.”

  “Let’s have a drink.”

  A few drinks loosened them up. Paine told Roberdeau what he had thought of him at Amboy, and Roberdeau, smiling grimly, suggested that Paine have a bath. They shook hands, Paine thinking of how a soft man past middle age can change and stay in a city that was dead, and not worry too much about being hanged by the neck. They went off to find a press, bought a small one, and lugged it in a cart to Roberdeau’s house. Paine was dead tired and wanted to sleep, dead tired and dozing in the tub that Roberdeau and his son filled with hot water, and then sleeping restlessly while the general went off to find paper. When he woke, he had forgotten where he was, a feather bed that gave under his hands, quilts, and a bright room with good furniture.

  When Roberdeau returned, Paine was sitting in the parlor, drinking black coffee and talking to a handsome girl of twenty-four, Roberdeau’s niece. He had told her of the flight from New York, and she was leaning back, seeing it with her eyes half closed, her face and hands tense.

  “But we begin again,” Paine said. “It isn’t over.”

  “I can see that,” she nodded. “The way you tell about them, it wouldn’t be over, ever. But how long—will it be years?”

  Paine shook his head.

  “But doesn’t it matter to you?” she persisted.

  “Not to me, no. You see, that’s my life, nothing else. When it ends here, it starts somewhere else, and I go there.”

  “As if to say, where freedom is not, there is my place?”

  Paine nodded.

  “I pity you,” she said.

  “Why? I’m happy enough.”

  “Are you?” She felt like weeping; she rose and somehow left the room.

  Roberdeau returned, successful in that he had been able to buy several hundred pounds of varying stocks and a few gallons of ink. He had also found a printer with guts enough to set on his own, a small man called Maggin who could print only a few hundred a day in his old-fashioned vise-type press. That night Paine set type, and all the following three days they printed, hardly sleeping, dirty with ink and working like madmen to turn out copies of the pamphlet before the city fell. Their courage was contagious, and other printers climbed off the fence. Within a week, Crisis I was circulating by the thousands, injecting new life into the Philadelphia bloodstream, bundles going to the army where they were read aloud, bundles smuggled into New York, which the British held, a sticky manifesto that screamed with rage, hope, and glory.

  On Christmas Day, at night, Washington did the impossible. His army dissolving as quickly as wet sand, he found it beyond his power to do as once he had planned, retreat westward and further westward, beyond the mountains if necessary, but never risk an engagement with the British. After being battered and defeated time after time, he was coming to the realization that his course was not to fight a war of battles but a war of spaces, a war which might last for many, many years, but so long as his army was intact, one that he could not lose.

  But his army was no longer intact. Unless some victory were achieved, some deed to spur the imagination of the people, it would cease to exist entirely. And at Christmas Day, at night, he recrossed the Delaware and attacked an encampment of drunken, sodden German mercenaries.

  He took over a thousand prisoners; it was the first victory, sorely needed, and things that were almost at an end began again.

  For the time, the city was saved; people who had fled came back to Philadelphia, even the Congress, and to half a dozen of them, in a coffee house, Paine said things that were not easily forgotten. He was a little drunk. To Roberdeau he made poor apologies, “Yes, I was drunk. How else can a man watch them?” They were planning campaigns on a tablecloth, and they had it figured up and down, forward and backward, how Washington could win the war in a month. “To hell with the lot of you!” Paine said.

  They asked him what he meant, and he said he meant that some had stayed in the city and some had run away.

  “Without the Congress, the revolution ceases to exist,” they parried.

  “Without the Congress!” Paine roared. “God save us—but tell me, what has the Congress done? A city like this with a thousand men to hold the houses and barricade the streets could last forever—forever, I tell you, and the whole British Empire could not force its way through it. But the Congress went, and the city lost its head, and I tell you, not you but Washington, not you but a few hundred poor ragged devils saved this cause! Not you!”

  He was drunk, but they didn’t quickly forget what he said. And between themselves, they decided that Paine might very well be dispensed with, that Paine was more a nuisance than an asset. They pointed to the clothes he wore, clothes not fit for a beggar, to his old, battered wig, to the fact that he carried a musket in the streets.

  The armies had settled into the torpor of a cold winter, and Paine found a room where he could write. Another crisis was over, and the devil sat on his pen; he no longer had to seek for words; they came to him easily now, and every word was a bitter memory. “… Never did men grow old in so short a time,” he wrote. “We have crowded the business of an age into the compass of a few months—” He would sit back and think of those months, and though he wrote easily enough, what he sought for did not come to him; he sought a rationalization, a scheme, and a progress for revolution; he wanted the whole and this was only a part. When through the murk a half-formed vision of a world remade appeared, his own impotence and futility drove him half mad. Then he would drink, and the righteous souls could point to him and be sustained.

  There were few pastors in Philadelphia that winter who did not preach a sermon on Tom Paine. One roared, “Look you upon the unrepentant! What cause is served or benefited by a foul mouth and a drunken brain? Is this liberty, this mocking specter that prowls the streets and defames all that is precious to mankind?”

  To the few who stood by him, Paine said, “No, it’s not war, not revolution; those who hate us sit on their asses and eat their three meals and sleep on feather beds, and who gives a damn that an army lies out there in the snow?”

  Bell agreed to publish the second Crisis, providing Paine supplied the paper stock. Paine, who hadn’t a coin in his pocket, stared at Bell speechlessly.

  “Mon, mon, take a quiet look at it,” Bell said, sp
reading his arms. “There’s no stock coming in, and a mon does not make a penny, turning himself upsidedown to print a throwaway.”

  “And was Common Sense a throwaway? I didn’t ask an accounting, but are you a rich man or a poor one for printing it? How many hundred thousand did you sell?”

  “Ye’re talking fables.”

  “Am I?”

  “These are hard times.”

  “Do you know how hard they are?” Paine smiled. “You lined yourself well on my book. Be careful, Bell, more than one man has found himself a cist straddling a fence.”

  “Are ye threatening?”

  “No, no—forget that. I want a good press, and I don’t give a damn whether Satan himself drives it. Will you print if I find the stock?”

  “That I will.”

  They shook hands on it, and then Paine went to find paper. Roberdeau was gone from town, as was Jefferson; Franklin was off in France, and his son-in-law was one of those who thoroughly despised Paine. Aitken hadn’t enough stock to print ten copies. Paine, weary, without food for a day past, pressed his way through town trying to sell his credit, what it was worth, for a few thousand sheets of paper. John Camden and Lenard Frees, two merchants who had cornered sizable quantities of newsprint, had been warned to keep far from the author of The Crisis. They could not be reached; Paine stormed and threatened and pleaded; a skinny clerk said persistently:

  “I am sorry, they have no paper for sale.”

  He could have bought a hundred thousand of foolscap, but the owner would sell only for cash, and British cash at that. To no avail, Paine insisted:

  “I tell you, don’t look at what I am! People have forgotten Common Sense, and I’m a damned beggar, dirty, a drunkard, I know, but ask them if ever I defaulted on a debt? Ask them that! Ask who in Philadelphia Tom Paine owes a penny to? Ask them!”

  He sought out Aitken again.

  “Go to see the Jew, Simon Gonzoles,” Aitken told him.

  Black and big, Gonzoles had a curly beard that swept down his chest to his waist. He wore a velvet gown and a skullcap, and looked curiously at a Gentile who smelled so strongly of liquor. Sniffing with his beaked nose, he nodded at the name of Paine, yes, he should cross the threshold. There was a girl in the big, twilit room, round and soft as a peach, and she stared at Paine, half in fright, half in wonder.

  “I know little of paper,” Gonzoles said. “In furs I dealt once, and what have you done to the fur trade, with your revolution and fury?”

  Paine shook his head, said nothing, but pleaded with his tired eyes.

  “For disciples of the Book,” Gonzoles said, “we Jews know surprisingly little of that on which the word is printed. If I desired to help you, where would I go?”

  “I can buy—for English gold,” Paine begged him. “For two hundred guineas a hundred thousand of foolscap—that’s a fine paper, not like common print or book stock, a writing paper, you understand, for genteel purposes, but believe me, what I wrote needs to be said. That’s all I can buy.”

  “I know what you write,” the Jew said, not without a trace of bitterness, yet Paine never took his eyes from him as he went to an iron-bound strong box and counted out the money.

  “I look like a beggar,” Paine said. “I smell like a drunkard—but I pay my debts.”

  “This isn’t a debt.”

  “I swear—”

  “Don’t swear!”

  Paine stood a moment, stiff, trembling a little, then took the money and left, hardly able to keep from running, clutching the gold in both his hands, hiring a cart on the way to take the paper to Bell’s.

  All that night, he worked with Bell, all the next day, his hands wet with ink, the good, pungent smell filling the air about him.

  Roberdeau came back and saw him on a street corner, looked as he would at a ghost, and then grasped one arm and cried sharply, “Paine!”

  “Yes?”

  He wasn’t drunk, Roberdeau saw. “Come home with me,” he said.

  “Yes—”

  He led Paine home, but he had to walk slowly, so that the stumbling figure could keep up with him. Roberdeau’s niece was there as they came in, Paine edging shabbily forward clutching his hat.

  “Irene, Mr. Paine is staying to dinner,” Roberdeau told her.

  Paine nodded and smiled and said nothing, nothing at dinner in the way of conversation; he ate slowly with control, but he ate and ate, smiling apologetically now and then. Bluntly, Roberdeau asked, “When did you eat last, Tom?”

  “Two days, I think, or three.”

  The girl turned her head; Roberdeau, staring down at his plate, said brutally, “You can change the world, but you can’t keep body and soul together. My God, Paine, are you mad?”

  A shrug in reply, no words.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know. I’m writing a crisis—we need one.”

  “You’re writing a crisis—Paine, don’t you realize that life goes on, even in wartime, that you’re doing no one any good, not you, not Washington, not our cause by being a beggar and a drunkard on the streets of Philadelphia—”

  “Shut up!”

  “No, I’ll talk, because you’re worth something more than a damned filthy drunkard. I heard you at Amboy, and now you’ll hear me!”

  “I’m leaving,” Paine said, rising.

  “The devil you are. Irene, get out of here!” The girl left, but paused at the door a moment, giving Paine such a look of sympathy, of warm human kindness, that between that and the pressure of Roberdeau’s heavy hand Paine sank back into his chair. Roberdeau sat facing him; he took some snuff, offered the box to Paine, and then filled two glasses with brandy. They drank and sat in silence for about five minutes.

  “Say your piece,” Paine nodded, and in that moment Roberdeau reflected upon a man who had sucked in the whole soul and being of America, even to the speech. In the unshaven, hook-nosed, wigless head, there was something both fierce and magnificent, a grinding savagery that might be sculpted as the whole meaning of revolution, unrest and cruelty combined with a deep-etched pattern of human suffering and understanding.

  “Suppose you made this uprising,” Roberdeau said carefully. “Let us say that without Common Sense there could have been no United States of America. Let us say that without the first Crisis we couldn’t have pulled through the January of this year. What then: is it the beginning or the end? How many times have you said that we don’t know yet what we’ve raised? At the rate you’re going, you’ll be dead in six months.”

  “I’m tougher than that.”

  “Are you? I don’t think so. There are those who love you, Paine, but how many hate you?”

  “Enough, I suppose.”

  “All right. You have to fight, and you’re in no condition to fight. You have to live, and you haven’t a penny to your name. Now listen to me, the Committee of Secret Correspondence is going to be reorganized as a permanent Office of Foreign Affairs. There’s a post open for an official secretary, and I’m going to have Adams put you up for it.”

  “Through Congress?” Paine smiled.

  “Through Congress.”

  “To hell with them,” Paine muttered. “I’m a revolutionist, not a dirty, sneaking politician.”

  But Roberdeau said quietly, “Stay here with Irene. I’m going to see Adams.”

  He was gone a long while. Paine sat in a deep wingchair and listened to the girl play on the clavichord. He must have dozed a bit, because when he opened his eyes, she had stopped playing and was watching him.

  “Tired?”

  He said, no, he wasn’t tired, and asked her what she had been playing.

  “Bach.”

  “Please play again,” he asked her.

  The little instrument rustled like a harp; Paine watched the girl’s back, the motion of her head, the strong muscles that played her fingers.

  She was less beautiful than strong and handsome; there was a tawny color in her hair that spoke of a Norman strain som
ewhere in the family, yet in every motion and gesture she was French. Through playing, she turned to Paine and she was startled by something in his eyes. For some reason Paine thought she would go. He asked her to stay.

  “Yes, of course.” She sat down near him and said, “Tell me about yourself.”

  He began to tell her, speaking in a soft voice, his eyes half closed. In a little while Roberdeau would return, and there might be a good chance that he had succeeded. Politics was a career, and Paine was very tired.

  “I think you’re the strangest man I have ever known,” she said. “I think—”

  “What?”

  She walked over and kissed him, and then Paine was smiling strangely. “Of course, it’s no good,” she admitted. “You’re damned, aren’t you?”

  Paine said nothing, and then they just sat and waited for Roberdeau.

  To his amazement, Paine got the office, in spite of a fervent objection by a small clique, headed by Witherspoon, a Scotch pastor and one-time supporter of the bonnie Prince Charlie. Witherspoon hated Paine, not only because he was a fearless writer, but because he was both a Quaker and English. The clique accused him of everything from murdering children and being a secret agent for the British, to being an apostate and a devil without horns. But Adams and Jefferson and others stood up for him, and at the time there were reasons for the two parties to make a deal. Tom Paine became secretary to the committee of the new Department of Foreign Affairs, with a salary of seventy dollars a month.

  It was a new feeling, respectability. Seventy dollars a month was not a fortune; indeed in the recently issued continental currency, it threatened to become nothing at all very soon; yet it was more than enough for Paine’s simple needs, enough to pay the few debts he had, to buy him a decent suit of clothes, clean if not spacious quarters, pen and paper to write with, and no danger of starving.

  And the respectability, of course; Paine the revolutionary was nothing; Paine the writer, whose book had been read and reread by almost every literate person in the thirteen colonies, and spoken aloud to most of those who were not literate, whose book had caused the British ministry to curse the day when the written word had been made available to commoners, was a mere scribbler; Paine the pamphleteer, who had done as much as any man in America to hold the army together in its worst hour, was a rabble rouser and no more: but Paine the secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs was a person of some consequence, on the inside among the circle of the gods that be, able to do a person a favor and say the right word in the right place. Or so they thought, and more hats were tipped to him, more hellos said, more waists bent than ever before.