by Howard Fast
In the Crisis Extraordinary he was at his calmly furious best, appealing to the merchants for a common front, begging them to believe that only in a democracy could a man of business have full play for his abilities. In the Crisis on Public Good, he begged the confederation to fight together, not to fall out among themselves, not to let regional differences turn them from the common enemy. He began to think of a national government now; what had happened in Pennsylvania was a warning.
There was a week of sheer drunkenness when his brain bogged down, when he felt he was over and through and could go on no longer, and then he came out of it, thinner than before, yet more resolute—with a scheme for carrying the revolution to England personally. He would go there himself. A Common Sense to the British citizen, the British working man and farmer.
Nathanael Greene talked him out of that. The Benedict Arnold affair had just run its course, and the British were burning with the execution of André.
“If they could hang Paine,” Greene said, “that would even things. I am afraid we still need you.”
Suddenly, not in a day nor a week, but suddenly enough after all the years, the war was being won, not over yet, no treaty of peace signed, but nevertheless won, the heartache and hopelessness finished, a British army trapped at York-town, the British cause in America torn to shreds, a French grant of several millions solving the financial problem, the Tories shattered. Then it was Paine alone and frightened, looking at all this, and wondering, “Where am I? Who am I?”
The props had been knocked from under him; always on the outside, always the man behind the scenes, always the propagandist, he found a time now when there was no need for propaganda, no need for men behind the scenes. In a victorious army, the pleading, exhorting figure of Paine would stir only laughter. His trade was revolution, and now he was without a trade.
“Go back to staymaking then,” he told himself morosely. His friends, his companions were turning their hand to statecraft, construction; others were grabbing, because victory meant spoils. And he, who was so definitely not a statesman, had no desire for spoils.
There was a trip to France. His old friend and the onetime president of the Congress, Henry Laurens, had been taken prisoner by the British while sailing to Holland. Paine, who knew Laurens’ son, tried to lift the boy out of his misery.
“It won’t be forever,” he told John Laurens. “There’ll be an exchange of prisoners soon. The war will be over—”
Paine had a way with men, and the boy came to worship him. Then, when young Laurens went to Paris to help push the French loan, he begged Paine to accompany him, and Paine, who saw his work on this side of the ocean coming to an end, agreed. In a way, it was a holiday, the first he had ever known in all his life, he an honored visitor in France, men of distinction begging him to autograph their copies of Common Sense, making him understand, as he had never understood before, that he, Paine, really mattered.
It was over all too soon. The mission was successful; everything, it seemed, was successful now, and Paine, coming home on a ship loaded down with two and a half millions of livres in silver, could not help reflecting on the curious change in the little union of colonies which called itself America. As for instance when he wrote his last Crisis paper, just before the trip to France. No trouble about publishers then; a dozen printers clamored for the privilege of printing it. Crisis papers were safe investments now that the crisis had passed.
They asked Paine to dinner soon after he had returned to America, Mrs. Jackson, who had been Irene Roberdeau, and her husband. Frank Jackson had no jealousy of Paine; he said to Irene, quietly, “Why, he’s almost an old man!”
Irene was still young and lovely. As she sat with her child at her knee, she confirmed Paine’s aging lassitude. He was old; he was finished; it was only in a dream that he had dared to love this woman.
“What are you going to do now, Thomas?” she asked him.
And he tried to smile his way out of it, implying that there would be much to do. He was a busy man, he said, so much writing, so many dinners—
“The revolution is done,” Frank Jackson said, and there was nothing for Paine but to agree.
“They won’t forget you.”
A sop to him. “Why should it matter?” he muttered.
“You look so tired,” Irene said.
He was tired; damned tired and wanting to get out of this place and get good and drunk. Who were these people, and how did he come to be sitting there in their house? Who was he but a wandering staymaker who had been something else for a while?
“You’ll need a rest,” Irene said.
“I imagine I will,” he agreed. After that, he could not get away quickly enough.
He was not even the clerk of the Assembly now—nothing, Tom Paine, former revolutionist, a little more ragged than usual, a little more empty under his belt. The expected thing after Yorktown was a spree, and he had been drunk for four days; but that didn’t go on. You had to eat and drink; you found that shoe leather wore out; you needed a room, no matter how small and dirty and disreputable.
The loneliness was not to be abated. Roberdeau had gone to Boston. Greene was campaigning in Carolina, and when he wrote that it would be like old days if only Paine were with him, Paine thought ruefully, “Not like old days. I was needed then. I’m no part of victory.”
Wayne was knifing through Georgia with the now famous Pennsylvania Line; the best soldiers in the world they were called. The years made a difference; Paine could remember five hundred of them by name.
Washington came to Philadelphia for a triumph, but it was a hollow triumph; his stepson had just died. The tall Virginian looked wasted and empty, and when he called for Paine, they were like two men left over. Paine was ashamed of his dirty clothes, his appearance, his mottled face.
“My old friend,” Washington said.
Paine began to brag; he was thinking of doing a history of the revolution. Did Washington know how many copies of Common Sense had been printed?
“I know my own value,” Paine boasted.
Thinking of how perspectives changed, of what a wretched creature this scribbler was, away from the campfires and dis-illusioned, mutinous men, Washington smiled and said, “My dear Paine, no one of us will ever forget your value.” Why did revolution leave such a backwash? Everyone was looking for rewards, but how did this fit into a world of peace and order?
“Even Morris recognizes what you have done,” Washington said quickly. “On two fronts, the home front and the fighting front, it was Paine who kept the cause together—I tell you that with the deepest conviction, my good friend—”
They parted soon after, and Washington was not there to see Paine weep.
A delegation of rank and file soldiers called upon him. Months and months of back pay was owed to them; would Paine be their spokesman? Would Paine organize their demand and present it to the government? No one knew better than Paine what they had suffered through the years of war; no one had been closer to them than Paine. His pen had flashed fire for the revolution, and now had it a little fire left for those who had fought the revolution?
“Our aims are being accomplished,” Paine told them wearily. “Now you must wait. Any sort of demands backed by force would be close to sedition—”
The soldiers stared at him dumbfounded.
He took the case to Robert Morris, the minister of finance. “Of course, their claims are just,” he pointed out to Morris. No one could say otherwise. But was this the time? Could Morris do something?
“Something, naturally,” Morris said. It seemed so long ago that they were fighting each other. “These men are deserving, they will be paid,” Morris assured Paine. “You were right not to encourage sedition. If the war may be considered won, then certain legal practices must be observed—”
Thoughtfully, Morris said, “You could turn your very considerable writing ability to our use, Paine. The government could be made to realize—”
“I didn’t come for
that.”
“No, merely a thought, let us leave it in a place where we can take it up again.” After a moment, Morris said, “There is no reason why we should be enemies.”
Paine nodded and left; of course, no reason. Revolution and counter-revolution were done now. Men turned their hands to reasonable things.
Some writing, drawing pay from a government that no longer needed him, a new suit of clothes, a piece explaining the revolution to Europe, an emasculated piece, another Crisis with a touch of the old fire—why isn’t peace formalized?
A few weeks with Kirkbride. Old soldiers dropped in; they talked of a thousand years ago, when they marched from Hackensack to the Delaware; but there was another trend of talk. The future bulked bright and large in America.
But how for him?
Desperately, he tried to interest himself in the future of America, the spoils and the glory, the boasting and memories, the speculations, the coming boom, the pride of being a free citizen in a great republic.
“Where freedom is not, there is my country,” he had said once.
The peace came; America strutted like a peacock, free and independent. Fireworks and flag-waving and speeches and banquets and glory without end.
A tired Englishman who was once a staymaker, among other things, wrote:
“The times that tried men’s souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.…”
He might have signed it: Tom Paine, revolutionist at large.
PART TWO
EUROPE
11
GIVE ME SEVEN YEARS
BLAKE, the painter and the poet, said to him, to Tom Paine, “They are going to hang someone, and it might as well be you. They intend it to be you. They’ve longed to put a rope around your neck since 1776. You can’t bait the lion in his den interminably, and England isn’t America—”
“England isn’t America,” Paine agreed. He knew that by now.
“Then get out of London. Get out of England. Dead, you’re no good to anyone.”
“Run away,” Paine murmured, and Blake laughed grimly.
“I can’t laugh,” Paine said. It had come down like a castle of cards; it was the year seventeen ninety-two, and he was Thomas Paine, esquire, revolutionist at large, packing an old valise hurriedly, preparing to flee from London and not be hanged—not yet. He was only fifty-five. He had said, “Give me seven years, and I will write a Common Sense for every nation in Europe.” And now it was done in England. He had written a book called The Rights of Man, but somehow there were not the same bitter, stubborn farmers who had taken up their guns at Concord and Lexington. And he was fifty-five and tired and running away.
It was still dark, an hour or so before dawn, when Frost and Audibert pounded on his door and demanded to know what on God’s earth was keeping him.
Anything into the valise now; a copy of The Rights of Man, an undershirt, and a half-finished manuscript.
“I’m coming—”
“The Dover stage won’t wait—and the hangman won’t!”
“I said I’m coming!”
Then it was done now, and England had slipped back to what England had been before. The bright, quick flame of glory was over; the little plots hatched in cellars and taverns were over. The forty-two muskets in Thaddeus Hatter’s basement would stay there until they fell apart with rust. The barrel of gunpowder had been rolled into the Thames, and the shipworkers and miners and weavers and shopkeepers would stare at each other with the guilty, ashamed look of men who had for a moment dreamed the impossible and dared to believe it.
“I’m coming,” Paine said.
In the stage, lurching over the pitted road that led to Dover, Frost nudged him and whispered, “In front, Leonard Jane.” Jane was an agent of the crown, one of the many sharp-faced men who made their way here and there and saw things; it was before the day of the secret service.
“And I thought you said no one would know,” Paine complained petulantly.
“Well, they know—”
In the pale tint of the early dawn, and then flushed by the bright red sun of morning, he had to sit and realize what it would mean to die, to be stretched, hanged by the neck, to have that bit of doggerel shrieked by every ragged urchin as they rode him to the gallows:
“Paine, Paine, damned be his name,
Damned be his fame and lasting his shame,
God damn Paine! God damn Paine!”
In his rush of thought, he whispered to Audibert, “If they take me, go to America, and go to Washington who remembers me, tell him how it was here, tell him there’s no difference, England or America, only the want of a man like him—”
They didn’t take him, but only because they weren’t sure of themselves. “Even here,” Audibert said, “you can’t arrest a man without a warrant.” And something had gone wrong; when they reached the customs at Dover, the warrant hadn’t come through yet.
The customs men searched every bit of their luggage, found Paine’s book, and tore it in half and threw it on the floor, “That for the rights of man and god damn you!”
Paine forgot what it meant to be hanged and said, “Shut your dirty mouth,” a ringing tone in his voice that harked back ten years. Paine had been a soldier, and his eyes flashing he said, “Shut your dirty mouth!” Then he picked up the two halves of his book.
They were locked in a room, the three of them, and down from the barracks marched a detachment of six redcoats to stand guard outside the door.
“If the packet leaves without us,” Frost said—and then drew a line on his throat with one finger.
A crowd began to gather around the customs house, and soon they were screaming, “Paine, Paine, damned be his name!”
“Your people,” Frost said caustically, “who would rise to the banner of freedom and righteousness.”
“Poor devils.”
“Don’t waste sympathy on them. If we’re not out of here soon, we’ll require all your sympathy.”
“What are they holding us for?”
“A warrant, what else?”
Then the captain of customs opened the door and said, “Only by the grace of God, Paine, do you leave here. Don’t come back to England.”
Then Paine’s party pushed through the hooting, screeching crowd onto the packet. The anchor came up, and two barges began to warp out the little Channel ferry. Paine stood on deck.
“Will you come back?” Audibert asked him, as the white chalk cliffs receded.
“I’ll come back. It will be France, England and America—and then the whole world. I’ll come back.”
Safe on board the Channel boat, leaving England, leaving the hangman and the mob, Paine reflected how easily, how insidiously all this turmoil had begun. Back in America, when the struggle was over, he had put the revolution behind him; he had wanted to be Thomas Paine, esquire, dreaming of something for himself akin to what Washington had at Mt. Vernon. He was not an old man when the revolution ended; he was only forty-six, and a man’s life isn’t over then. Look at Franklin.
There comes a time when a man wants to sit back and say, “I’ve done enough; I want to eat and drink and sleep and talk and think.” There was one magnificent, never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, when he sat for hours in the warm sunlight with Franklin talking of things scientific and things philosophical. “Play with science,” Franklin told him. “That’s the new age, the dawning.”
“I would like to play,” Paine said, his eyes curious.
Well, he was deserving of it, wasn’t he? Not that he had made the war alone; but neither had Washington, nor Jefferson, nor Adams either. His part was not so slight that he was greedy in asking for some small reward, in petitioning Congress to give him some sort of livelihood, since he had nothing but revolution, since he was a specialist in change, and change was over.
They voted him a little money and a place in Bordentown and another in New Rochelle. It was enough. He lived simply, some dri
nk, plain food, a workshop—correspondence with the scientific minds all over the world who were pricking at the future.
“Thomas Paine, esquire,” he signed himself.
It was to be expected that a man would change; the times that tried men’s souls were over. He dabbled in politics, but in a gentlemanly way, the way Morris or Rush would dabble. And when he saw a beggar now, a poor drunken sot, an aging veteran, racked with dysentery and syphilis, a one-armed garrulous soldier, an artilleryman whose eyes had been blasted away by flaming powder, he did not say, “There, but by the grace of God, goes Thomas Paine.”
But that was to be expected too.
And sometimes he was a little ashamed of these louts who came to his house and cried, “Hey, Tom, hey there, old Common Sense, hey there, old comrade.”
Talking of old times, look what they had made of themselves! The old times were over.
Better than, that to dine with Washington, the tall fox-hunter whose name was spoken so reverently now, but who had nevertheless not forgotten the cold march down through the Jerseys.
“Madeira, Thomas?”
“I incline to claret.”
“But Madeira, Thomas, with all the sunshine of the blue sky of Portugal.”
Better to dine with Morris, Reed, Rush, now that old feuds had been patched up, old differences set aside; these were quality and these were the men who counted. They sipped their brandy and they talked of high financial matters, and they were the powers behind this new United States of America; and Paine was permitted to sit in and see what delicate maneuvering made the world go round.
A man changes; or perhaps that is wrong and a man never changes. Here, in this year of seventeen ninety-two, leaning on the rail of the Channel boat that was taking him over to France, away from an England that would have hanged him, watching the white chalk cliffs of Dover, he cast back in his memory and let the events run by, one by one, as they had happened.
