Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  And Paine came to live in the world within, where the ivory tower protected even the most sensitive. Soon enough he discovered that where the quaint inner circle of colonial politics began, reality stopped. That war was being fought by a haggard, desperate little army led by a quiet and stubborn man called Washington, mattered so little to the Continental Congress of the United Thirteen Colonies that it was only by deliberate resolution that they could recall the nature of the situation.

  On their side, it might be said that they were as impotent as any governing body could conceivably be; able to make treaties, they could not force observation of them; they had the right to coin money, but no power to buy gold or silver, and with the power to wage war, they could not raise a single soldier. In the one worst moment of crisis, when Washington’s shivering and defeated troops had finally crossed to the southwest bank of the Delaware, they had abdicated voluntarily, fled in panic from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and given to Washington the full power of a dictator.

  Their knowledge of warfare was confined to the continental military tracts they read so feverishly; each had his own personal military theory and fought for it, and the only military fact they agreed in was that it would be ridiculous to fight the war in the one style Americans knew, the silent, terrible bushwacking tactics that had torn a British army to ribbons between Concord and Lexington.

  They were split into parties, the pro- and anti-confederation, the northern party, the southern, the pro-reconciliation and anti-reconciliation, the pro-Washington and anti-Washington. There were the isolationists who believed revolution was a property peculiar to Americans of pure British descent and of the eastern coast of North America and that all other persons and places should be excluded; and there were the internationalists, those who would rally the insular Dutch, Irish, Scotch, Swedes, Jews, Poles, French, and Germans, and add to them whatever liberal and anti-British feeling existed on the continent of Europe. Not the Sons of the American Revolution but the non-fighting ancestors were already working feverishly to make the roster exclusive.

  And to add on the coals, they had discovered the good American device of lobbying.

  They lobbied for everything: to have their local towns, counties, cities protected by troops; the Southerners to have tobacco adopted as a necessity for the troops; the down-easters to convince all that no one could fight without a liberal ration of rum; the wool-runners to sell woolen blankets at four times the price they had ever sold them; the midlanders to sell their grain; the New Englanders to have the troops fight on curds; the New Yorkers to have them fight on beef.

  And they could agree on nothing, not on the style of the confederation, not on post-war aims, not on a constitution. The honest, sincere men among them fought and broke their hearts, and somehow things were done and somehow the war blundered along.

  And into this Paine came, a revolutionist whom all regarded with suspicion. He did his work, he wrote another Crisis; he sat in a cubicle and pushed his pen as a clerk, and sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he would see men in rags with a rattlesnake banner. And he saw Irene Roberdeau and said, “Look at me. Do you like it?”

  “I think you look better than you ever looked.”

  “Do I? And I tell you, something is dying inside of me.” She noticed then what a flair he had for the dramatic.

  “I can’t stand much more of this,” he decided.

  “I hear you’re greatly appreciated.”

  “You do? They’re waiting for a chance to be rid of me, and the sooner it comes, the better. This is a people’s war, and some day the people may awake to that.”

  “And can’t you forget the war even for a while?”

  “You told me I was damned,” Paine smiled.

  “But not beyond redemption,” she said.

  The carts came into Philadelphia with half a hundred badly wounded men, and Paine worked with others, feeding them, making them comfortable in the old Quaker meeting house to which they were taken. Some he knew; he was Common Sense to them. He found his Crisis papers among their belongings; a paper read a dozen times would end as dressing for wounds or wadding for a gun.

  “A stout heart,” he would say.

  He sat all one night holding the hand of a boy who was dying, and the next day he washed the body and laid it out himself. It was before the time when women would go near a dying or a wounded man; the male nurses were tobacco-stained, filthy old devils. Paine told Irene Roberdeau soon after, “I’m going away, I must.”

  “Where?”

  “To the army—I’m no good for this sort of thing.”

  She pleaded with him, asked him whether it was not enough to throw herself at his feet.

  “I’m no good for you,” he said. “I’m no good for anything except this stew I’ve brewed.” Yet he lingered on in Philadelphia.

  It was spring again, and the armies were moving in the field. Plowing over, farmers picked up their muskets, cleaned off the rust, and drifted down the country lanes toward Washington’s encampment. Last summer was forgotten; the shop clerks forgot and left their shelves, and the mechanics laid away their tools. A lark and a campaign, and the war would be over. Spring does that, coming suddenly with the sky bluer than ever it was during the winter. The few thousand regulars, lean and hard, mocked the way Yankees mock at the summer soldiers, the militia who took their fighting as they would bird shooting, in between the planting and the harvest. “Where were you at Christmas Day?” became the taunt, harking back to the time they turned like wolves at bay and crossed the Delaware. This was the year for ending the war; they could prove that by the almanacs, by the stars, by gypsy fortune tellers. Ho and away; there were rations in plenty, and up from New Orleans by the bosom of broad mother Mississippi had come a thousand fat hogsheads of gunpowder, lead weight to cast a million of shot and three thousand shining Spanish bayonets. There was no treaty with Spain yet, but rustic farmers, suddenly turned astute politicians, winked and nodded their long heads as they ran a hard forefinger over the Toledo steel; one knew about those things.

  It was in Washington’s mind to make a campaign in the north against Burgoyne, but the middle country was screaming to be protected. Howe had packed his British and Hessians into their great ships and sailed away with them, and who knew where they would land? They were sighted off Delaware, and then word came that they were sailing into Chesapeake Bay. The American army, swelled to a considerable size now by the influx of militia, began to march south.

  Paine watched them strut through Philadelphia. It was summer and hot, and stripped to the waist, their muskets slung over their backs, barefooted most of them, they appeared fine and ready and trim.

  Paine was neither seen nor minded; he stood in the packed crowd that cheered and hooted and waved at the sunburned marchers, bright and gay with sprigs of green tucked under their caps and behind their ears. Washington rode by in his buff and blue, looking healthier and younger than he had this midwinter past; alongside of him was the boy Paine had heard of but not seen before, young Lafayette in white twill and satin, beribboned all over with gold braid. Hamilton was there and fat Harry Knox, nursing along their lumbering guns, and Nathanael Greene to whom Paine waved—but a man is not to be seen in a crowd.

  Paine went to Roberdeau’s home, but Irene was not there. She left a note for him that she had gone to watch the parade.

  And then they were defeated at Brandywine Creek, slashed to pieces, cut and routed, the old story of men who were willing to die but didn’t know how: the old story of mistakes, a listing of blunders, each one worse than the last.

  With a dead, white face, Paine heard the news, walked to the office of the Committee with dragging steps. “Of course, Congress most leave the city again,” everyone said. No one had the truth of what had happened; they were running around like chickens freshly slaughtered; they were frightened.

  The whole city was catching the virus of panic, the Tories with fear that the rebels would take their revenge before they left, the rebe
ls with fear that the Tories would not allow them to leave. Neither party quite knew the strength of the other. But the British would march on Philadelphia; that, at least, was obvious.

  Paine found Irene, and she said to him what she hadn’t dared to say before,

  “Come with me—out of all this. Haven’t you done enough and suffered enough? It’s over now, and if they go on, how long will it be, ten years? or twenty? Paine, I’ve never loved anyone else—and if you leave me now—”

  “And if I stay with you? What kind of happiness would you have with me! I have nothing, Irene, except an old shirt and a pen to write with. I’m a camp-follower of revolution, a scribbler, and a pamphleteer.”

  “I won’t ask you again, Tom.”

  He nodded and went without kissing her, without saying anything else, and the next day he heard that she and her uncle had left the city. They were not alone in leaving. The Tories made a show of strength, brawls and gunshots and now and then a woman’s scream—the city was dying and not gently. As during that last time when the city had been threatened, Paine tried to plead with the leaders of the Associators. Congress had gone, but there were one or two left, friends of his, with a little influence, and between them they managed to call a meeting in Carpenter’s Hall. Less than two hundred persons appeared, and when Paine addressed them, they listened in silent apathy.

  “A city,” he cried, “is the best fortress in the world, the forest of the citizen soldier! Every street can become a fortress, every house a death trap! The army lost a battle, but this is a people’s war, and the British army can break its back on the stout heart of Philadelphia—”

  There was no stout heart in the city. Paine sat in his room and wrote a Crisis paper, and below him the streets were deserted. One by one, the pro-continental citizens went. At night, a pistol bullet whistled past his ear. There was a parade of Tories, with a great banner reading, “Death to every damned traitor!”

  Paine carried his musket now; he saw them tar and feather a harmless old man, whose only sin was that he swept the hearths in Carpenter’s Hall; he died after Paine and a few others had taken him from the stake to which he was bound. A round dozen had the nerve to remain—sullen, desperate men with guns in their hands, and they buried the old man openly. Paine said softly, “God help them when the day of reckoning comes.”

  Houses were burning; the volunteer fireman’s association had gone to pieces completely; the houses burned and left their trail of smoke across the blue sky.

  Paine reflected curiously upon what such a situation does to men, for among the few rebels who stayed was Aitken, a somber, aging man who nodded when Paine told him about the new Crisis paper.

  “I’ll print it,” he said.

  “And when the British come?”

  Aitken shrugged; he didn’t seem to care. Paine begged him to make some provision for leaving the city and getting his presses out, but he shook his head stolidly.

  “A man does what a man can,” he said. “I have no other place to go.” And he stayed behind. When Paine came to say good-by, the Scotsman handed him five hundred freshly printed leaflets.

  “Go on,” he told Paine. “Get out before it’s too late.”

  Paine found an old, swaybacked nag, bought a saddle for a few dollars, and rode out of one end of Philadelphia as the Hessians marched into the other. And on the Baltimore Pike, he drew up his horse and sat for a while, listening to the beating of the British drums.

  He asked himself, “What am I now, propagandist without presses? Rabble rouser lingering at the scene of death after the mob has fled? Revolutionist surveying the dead corpse?” He rode slowly on the old nag, and often he looked over his shoulder at the city that had nursed a thing called America. He lay down to sleep in a copse, hobbling the nag first and keeping his musket by his side, but his dreams were not good. And the next day he stopped at a farm and called:

  “Halloo!”

  It was shuttered; a musket poked through a slit in the wood told him to be off. “Where is the army?” he called “God damn you and the army,” the slit said.

  And wasn’t it always that way when they suffered defeat, the countryside growing black and sullen, the houses shuttered, the cattle locked away, the whole face of the land becoming black and fearful? It had been so in New York, in Jersey, and now in Pennsylvania, and Paine began to wonder who it was that made and fought the revolution, when the fat, staid prosperity of the land was so awfully against it. He rode on and in circles, and once when he faced a farm, a bullet ripped the cloth of his jacket. In a cornfield, his horse tethered beside him, he lay and watched the blood-red sun setting; and never before had he been so lonely a stranger in so lonely a land. He saw once, far off and down a road, three men of the continentals, unmistakable, gaunt and barefoot and ragged as they were, but as he whipped his nag down on them they raced into the woods. And a milkmaid, whom he would have asked for a drink, parched and hungry as he was, fled into a barn when he made toward her. A frightened land. Paine rode in broad, slow circles. He rode out of dawning and into sunset, a lonely Englishman, a renegade Quaker who pursued a will-o’-the-wisp called revolution; he lay alone and hungry, and remembered Irene Roberdeau’s eyes and voice, her throat and her swelling breasts, and he cursed himself, his fate, all his destiny and all that was Tom Paine.

  And then one evening, he was stopped by a fierce, half-naked sentry, who wore a bloodstained bandage over his matted hair, and demanded:

  “Who goes there?—God damn you, answer up or I’ll blow out your dirty guts!”

  “Tom Paine.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “Then look at me. What is this?”

  “General Greene’s encampment. Let’s have a look—”

  He sat having dinner with Greene, the flies of the patched tent thrown back, a fringe of autumn trees dropping their leaves against the orange light of campfires, and Greene saying:

  “I tell you, Paine, you brought back my soul, I was so filthy tired and done in. Do you understand?”

  Paine nodded; how was it that Greene looked on him as a savior, that Greene held his hand and tried to let Paine know how it had been at Brandywine? In appearance, they were closer now, Greene’s handsome face worn and lined, incredibly aged for a man so young, Greene’s buff and blue uniform faded and ragged, his boots worn through at the toes.

  “So we lost Philadelphia,” Greene said, after Paine had told him. “Not a shot fired, not a hand raised, but we gave it up to them. It could have been a fortress, and was it you who said this was a people’s war?”

  “I said it.”

  “Are you tired, Paine?”

  “Tired, yes. There’s nothing good about war, nothing decent, nothing noble. You say, I will take up a gun and kill my brother, because the ends justify the means, because my freedom and my liberty are my soul’s blood, and how can I live without them? Make men free so that the land will shine with God’s holy light! And then they run away, they leave their own houses, they close their shutters and blow out your brains, if, God forbid, you should want a drink of water, and they damn you for a banditl If we were like the Jagers, it would be different, but we’re little men, general, little, tired, hopeless men.”

  “Yes—”

  “And now what?”

  “God knows. We are beaten and beaten.”

  “And him?”

  “Washington?” Greene shook his head. “We’re going to attack—he’s bewildered, well, we all are. We had a count and we still have eleven thousand men left—that’s strange, isn’t it? And they’re at Germantown with less than seven thousand, so we’re going to attack. But we are afraid; go outside later and talk to them, Paine, and you’ll see how afraid we are. We had a talk about it, and no one knew what to do. But Wayne, you know him?”

  “I know him.”

  “He sat in a corner and pretended to read a book, didn’t say anything, just fire in him and sometimes he’d look at me as if I hadn’t the guts of a rat left, and finally Washi
ngton asked him what would he do, what had he to say, and he answered, ‘I’d say nothing, I’d fight, sir, fight—do you hear me, fight, not run away, but fight!’” Greene’s voice slipped away; Paine prodded him.

  “And then?”

  “And then we looked at each other, because we were all afraid—and tomorrow we attack. For God’s sake, Paine, go out and talk to the men.”

  “Yes.”

  As he rose, Greene caught his arm. “What will you tell them?”

  “About Philadelphia—”

  “Do you think—”

  “They ought to know. It’s time for them to begin to hate. This isn’t a revolution, it’s civil war.”

  The nightmare of the Battle of Germantown Paine would not forget until his dying day. And a nightmare it was, so impossible a nightmare that not for months afterwards could the actual action be pieced together. In four columns, the American troops drove on the British and Hessians who were very nearly trapped. But the columns could not co-ordinate; it was dawn, and fog lay over the field like a pall of heavy smoke. Paine rode with Greene and was separated from him; lost, he ran into a whole regiment of continentals who were also lost. They fired at him; screaming with fury, he got into them and saw that half were drunk, the other half too weary to do more than stand oafishly. Then a storm of firing broke out ahead of him, and the men scattered. Riding toward the firing, Paine came on a steady stream of wounded. Most of them lay on the road, too weak to move. The fog made it dark as evening, and only by voice did Paine recognize Doctor Mulavy, who had been with Greene at Fort Lee. In a bloodstained apron, he yelled at Paine to find water, mistaking him, mounted as he was, for an officer.