Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  There was the iron bridge, a scientific experiment—and hadn’t Ben Franklin said that he had an eye and a mind for science? The bridge was something new in the world, of course, but a dreamer could see that iron was the coming master of man’s fate. And why not a bridge to begin, so useful a thing, so common a thing? So he played with the idea, sketched, and made, in model, a bridge of iron. People came forty miles to see it. Anyone could see that the bridge was just “Common Sense,” they said, making a poor pun of what had once been glory. The copies of the book Common Sense were turning yellow, stuffed, away in attics and chests, but folks said, “Mighty smart feller, Paine. Thinks like a Yankee.”

  He took the model to Philadelphia and set it up in Ben Franklin’s garden in Market Street. What a time that was! So many citizens called him Doctor Paine that he began to believe it—almost. He was toasted at dinners, luncheons, parties; four white wigs he owned, and his shirts were starched and faultlessly clean.

  And once Rush mentioned, “How does it seem now to read Common Sense, Paine?”

  “Common Sense?” as if it were some small matter that he could not easily call to mind.

  “It was good for the times,” he said judiciously.

  “And what times they were, those old days,” Rush laughed.

  “At each other’s throats.”

  “But now there’s enough for all.”

  “For all, of course,” Paine agreed.

  Then he took his bridge model to France. Five years ago that was, 1787, Thomas Paine, esquire, crossing the broad ocean to France, not a bumpkin sick in a dirty, festering hold, but a gentleman of parts, philosopher, scientist, politician, financier you might say; first-class stateroom, walks on the deck while passengers pointed him out to each other.

  His leaving America was in itself a reminder of the past; he still had enemies, enough to keep the State of Pennsylvania from erecting his iron bridge; and though he had hoped to go to France anyway, it was mostly bridge matter that sent him there. He had corresponded with the French scientists, spoken to Franklin about them, and he was quite certain they were the cleverest in the world, not to mention the wittiest. France would take up his bridge, then the world, then acclaim, then fortune. On shipboard, he felt youthful enough to have a mild flirtation with a Mrs. Granger of Baltimore, a flirtation which Paine pressed to the bedside with a grace and tact of which he would once not have thought himself capable. But why not? He was only in the summer of his life, healthier than he had ever been before, famous; forgotten as staymaker, cobbler, excise man, but Paine the philosopher and scientist.

  France welcomed him; old, imperial France. King Louis sat at royal court at Versailles. If there were mutterings somewhere, what had Paine to do with them? This was France, not America. Taking a hint from Franklin, he played the part of the simple but wise American, plain brown breeches, no wig, no scent, white shirt, black coat, black shoes, cotton stockings, a cordial, winning smile that made up for his ignorance of the tongue. He met them all, the politicians, philosophers, the wits and the fops, the scientists, the high lords and the humble scholars. To a man of talent, there were no barriers—and the French food! He would say:

  “Ah, we in America eat, but we do not cook.…”

  And why not England? Why not go home again—it was so close, and so many years had gone by? The bridge hung fire in France; they liked it, but not enough. And in England, too, old hates were forgotten; you might fight a people once, but you did business with them indefinitely. And wasn’t it said that in England George Washington was a greater hero than he was at home in America?

  Paine crossed to London.

  Dinner with Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, Marcus Hawley, the astronomer, Sir John Tittleton of the East India Company—each one shaking hands with Paine, bowing to him, expressing their earnest belief that it was an honor, “Upon my word, sir, an honor—”

  And of Common Sense, “Vigorous, sir, vigorous and thoroughly British, reaffirmation of the ancient dignity of the Magna Charta. America rebuffed us, but there was good English stubbornness in the rebuff, and who will say that the two countries are not wiser and more inclined to be one when the opportunity presents?”

  “One?”

  “The war was a mistake. We are intelligent men, we grant that.”

  How could he do otherwise than agree? Did they once bring up the fact that he was a staymaker, that he had rolled in the filth of Gin Row, that he had kept a tobacco shop? They were too well bred for that. Their superiority was lived rather than expressed, but so apparent that Paine, dazzled, could only smile, drink more than was good for him, smile and agree. You spent an evening with such men as these, and you saw why they ruled—brilliance, wit, charm, elegance; and perhaps you thought of the Massachusetts farmers, leaning on their big, rusty firelocks, spitting, or perhaps you did not think of that at all.

  And when he brought out his bridge model, there was a chorus of praise.

  “Trust the colonies to be a hundred years ahead of us in inventiveness.”

  A part of Paine’s mind thought, “They still call us the colonies.”

  Then Thetford, and it shocked him that the old place had not changed, not at all, not a stone moved, the furrows plowed in the tracks of a thousand years of furrows, a crow perched on top a fence where he thought he remembered it perching so long ago. After America, this was entirely out of the world, for America lived by change, tear down the house and build a better one, tear down the barn and build a better one, pave the streets, sewers? Why not? The Romans did it. A higher church and a higher steeple, a bigger town hall.

  But Thetford was the same, the tenant farmers brown clods of earth, not the tall, gangling, stubborn rustics of America, the new squire as fat and ruddy and overstuffed as his father, already gouty in one leg.

  They didn’t remember Paine; no one remembered him. The peasants pulled at their forelocks and said, “Eee, sir, thee be looking fur the Paine place?”

  His mother was alive, a withered little thing, ninety years old, partly blind, partly deaf; she didn’t remember him.

  “Ah,” she said, when he told her who he was. “Thee be my son?”

  “Thomas, Mother, Thomas,” feeling an awful sense of repulsion, of separateness, of having gone such a long distance that it was blasphemous to come back.

  “Thomas—he be dead.”

  “Me, look at me, Mother!”

  “Thee be Thomas?” so incredulously, rubbing her withered face, yet in a way, not surprised, not even troubled.

  He supped with the squire, the boy who had once hanged him up by his feet, roast beef, heavy boiled pudding, big mugs of beer. This was the landed gentry that had once glowed with a halo not so different from that on Christ’s forehead; you grouped them together when you stood rooted in the soil, looking up; Now the squire was so busy stuffing himself that it was all he could do to fling a word in edgewise now and then.

  “Back with us, Paine—”

  Carving a slice of beef and lifting the whole of it into his mouth, picking up a lump of pudding with his fingers and depositing it on the beef, then half a mug of beer drained down so quickly that part ran from the corners of his mouth, splashing over the napkin he had tucked into his neckpiece.

  “Beef?”

  Another slice jammed into his mouth, the long carving knife bearing the function of fork, spoon, and plate.

  “Find the place different? Out in the world, scooping fame and fortune. What d’y think of the colonies, Paine? Whig myself, but can’t stomach Americans, crude, Paine, too bloody damn crude.”

  And then another gob of pudding swimming into a mouthful of beer.

  Soon after, Paine left. He had provided that nine shillings a week be paid to his mother for as long as she should live.

  This was life as it should be lived; a man of wit, of parts, of philosophy did not remain in one place. Once he had said, “The world is my village, where freedom is not, there is my country”; and again the world was
his village, and wherever witty men chatted over brandy and coffee, there was his country. He crossed the Channel back to France, and the bright life of Paris opened its arms to him. Paine actually became gay; scratch and scratch and scratch at the surface, and still you would not find the staymaker, the cobbler, the rabble rouser who crouched over a drumhead one freezing night and wrote:

  “These are the times that try men’s souls …”

  In Paris, after these many years, he again met Tom Jeffer son, not so young now—but neither were any of them, the old group that had stood together in Carpenter’s Hall—but not so different, the long, sensitive face more deeply lined, the voice a little deeper, a little more puzzled when it spoke out at the world. He was genuinely glad to see Paine, and as they shook hands, Jefferson said:

  “Tom, Tom, it does my heart good, it’s a little of the old days, isn’t it, when two friends come together? A man grows, lonely so far from home, the more so when he mulls over his memories and begins to doubt them.”

  Paine spoke of his bridge, of his previous visit to France, his trip to his old home.

  “And how do you find it here?” Jefferson asked.

  Paine shrugged. “Louis will make reforms—the world moves that way.”

  “Does it?” Jefferson wondered. “Did it move for us or did we move it? There were some cold winters then, Tom.”

  Then let be what may! He could recall how he was again in England, looking in his mirror, telling himself, “I’ve done enough, enough!” In August, September, October of 1788, the social world of London opened its arms to him. Then, at the close of the eighteenth century, London was England as far as fashion went, and with the rumbling and muttering in France, it seemed that London might very well be the whole fashionable world. Four hundred years of sedulous effort on the part of the British ruling class had made of themselves the tightest clique of privileged titles anywhere in the world. Society was fixed, glazed, and varnished, and the only time the bars were ever let down was when a man of talent became as much a piece of fashion as skin-tight breeches or the Beau Brummell cravat.

  And Paine was that. Burke adopted him; Burke, who had once made the great speech on conciliation with America, had a reputation to uphold as a liberal of a sort. Actually, liberalism with Burke was a memory of his youthful past; he saw in Paine the beginnings of a change in a thinking man, a change that he himself had already passed through; it was as ominous and as certain as hardening of the arteries, and therefore he concluded that Paine was a safe diversion. He had him to his country place; he gave him dinners, took him to various iron works that might be interested in doing his bridge. He introduced him to such great persons as Pitt, Fox, the Duke of Portland—rivers of port, five hundred candles burning in one small room, great and beautiful ladies. Paine was introduced into the exclusive Whig club of Brooks’s, the same Brooks’s that he had stood outside of so many years ago, his heart full of bitterness. His heart was not full of bitterness now as Fox offhandedly begged him to step to the tables and have a look at what passed.

  Fortunes slipped across the table at Brooks’s. Ten thousand pounds on the turn of a card, a whole estate on the deal of one hand. Somewhere in London, poor wretches still starved by the thousands, ripped out their guts with hot gin, lived twelve in a room, worked for threepence a day; but at Brooks’s ten and twenty and thirty thousand pounds hung on the turn of a card.

  He recalled the slip of a thing at some ball—was it Lady Mary Leeds or Lady Jane Carson?—who had said to him:

  “Mr. Paine, do you know to what I attribute the success of you colonials in the American war?”

  “Indeed I do not know, madam.”

  “To your beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful blue and white uniforms. I loathe red—and I told that to General Arnold, to His Excellency’s face, I loathe red!”

  Then a disturbing element broke in upon the life of Tom Paine, gentleman—calm, dispassionate letters began to come from Jefferson in Paris, telling Paine how the French revolution had arrived. They became a canker that ate at his soul, turning him bitter and sour until finally he gave in to it and went to France once more—to see, only to see, only curiosity.

  Like smoke to a fire-fighter, that morning in Paris, when he, Tom Paine, who had come from fashionable London to revolutionary France, merely out of curiosity, as befitting a world traveler and philosopher, walked slowly through the workers’ quarters, saw the black looks thrown at him because he was so obviously an Englishman, saw the muskets in the shops, handy to the storekeeper’s grasp, saw the Bastille which had been so recently taken by the mob.

  It was like Philadelphia, in the old days, citizens grimly mindful of their responsibility, citizens suddenly aware that they were human beings and not dirt under foot. Smoke and fire to Paine, and he breathed it in.

  And then the welcome they gave him, the people when they learned who he was, his old comrade, Lafayette, who was commander of the National Guard, saying, “Militia, Thomas, but you and I know what they can do,” Condorcet, then still a person of weight.

  Condorcet had said to him in his very bad English, “I tell you, citizen Paine, that the written word does not die. I sat the other night with Common Sense, and I lusted, I lusted, friend Paine. We are a good people, we French, we are a strong people, and uncomplaining. Civilization will not have to be ashamed of us.”

  “Civilization is proud of you,” Paine whispered.

  Lafayette gave Paine the great, rusty key of the Bastille, and the onetime staymaker held it in his hands and fought to keep the tears back. That was how it happened, so insidiously.

  “Weep, weep, my friend,” Lafayette said impulsively. “We wept at other times; we moved worlds and awakened the sleeping ages. What have we to be ashamed of?”

  “What?” Paine wondered.

  “The key goes to America,” Lafayette smiled. “Give it to our general.” It still meant Washington and no other when they spoke of their general.

  Paine turned the key over and over in his hands.

  He told himself, “I am old and tired, and what have I to do with all this?” He lay awake one night with the old sleeplessness, his brain teeming with fifty years of not too pleasant memories, fighting himself, trying to find relief in a bottle of brandy, dozing a moment to dream of a Pennsylvania farm where love had come so briefly, asking himself again, “What have I to do with all this?”

  And then, getting out of bed, he felt for the key; how had they stormed the Bastille? Little people did such things; he knew; he remembered how the people of Philadelphia, clutching big muskets in uneasy hands, had marched up to the Delaware because he, Paine, wrote something about the times that tried men’s souls.

  He sat in the dark and turned over and over in his hands the key that had unlocked the Bastille. Lafayette had given it to him to give to Washington; Washington stood in the clouds, and Lafayette was a leader of France, and he, Paine, in between, was nothing. But in between was the moving impulse of revolution, a force summed up in himself, a passionate preaching that gained neither glory nor distinction, but by the power of the written word moved worlds.

  Asking himself, “Who are you, Paine, and what are you?”

  Still, there lingered like a dream the fashionable world of London. Burke and Pitt and Fox were great minds, brilliant men; why did Paine have to make a decision between the poverty and filth of his former days and the genteel world he had tasted? Does a man go back and reach out for dirt? If he could see in this slow and orderly unfolding of revolution in France, the bright dawn of a new world, a brotherhood of man, then wouldn’t the great minds of England see it as well? Civilization was reasonable, and France, England, and America together could form the unshakable basis of a new order. In England, they admired him, and they would listen. They would see that the revolution had to come, and they would give in without causing blood to be shed.

  Thus reasoned Paine, a man past fifty who had tasted so briefly of quiet and comfort, writing to men in England
, to Burke and Pitt bright, glowing letters of what had happened in France—

  “It embraces a new hope for all of us.…”

  “The result in its fullness, in its exaltation of the human spirit, will be shared by you as well as by the meanest chimney sweep.…”

  “Be of stout heart.…”

  And then he heard that Burke stood up in Commons and delivered so fierce, so heartless a blast against the revolution in France that it spoke more of madness than anger.

  “And you will answer him?” Condorcet said to Paine.

  Paine nodded.

  So it was Tom Paine, staring at the pen he held in his hand, sharpening one point after another, breaking a quill, cursing with the ripe, rich Anglo-Saxon oaths that he had learned in the London underworld, pleading with words; unshaven again, a bottle of brandy next to him, Paine again would be recognizable to the barefooted men who had marched with him down through Jersey. He had taken a room at the Angel, an inn at Islington outside of London, and he had a book beside him, a book called Reflections on the Revolution in France, written by Edmund Burke. It was a book that attacked, not only the French revolution, but all revolution, all progress, all hope, all man’s poor bruised faith in his ability to climb to where the gods sat.

  Burke had said that man, as man, had no rights. Paine set himself to write of the rights of man, to tell what he had seen of the French revolution, and to explain it—justification, it did not need. He wrote furiously, hotly, angrily, as he always wrote before the battle, before the guns sounded.

  And he was young again.

  “Loose, ’e is,” they said in the taproom down below. “Loose an’ black.”

  “’oo is ’e?”

  “Bloody damn colonial.”

  “What’s ’is grouch?”

  “The ’ole bloody world’s ’is grouch.”

  But when he came down, to stare at the bar, lean on it, stare at his big splay hands, order rum, more rum, more rum, they left him alone.