Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  With The Rights of Man, it was different; he flung that at the heads of a people totally unprepared, a people who in many cases imagined themselves in possession of a mythical freedom that was in no way actual, but existed in song and story and legend as the possession of every Englishman.

  They were not armed, they were not prepared, they were not religious dissenters; they looked at his book, yearned for freedom, and then went back to their work, their slums, and their gin-mills—and those few who had a germ of organization, the broad-faced miners of Wales, the weavers in the northern counties, the ironworkers—those few pondered their copies of Paine’s book, counted their bullets, and then, frightened, buried their muskets and did nothing—and when they heard that Paine had fled from England, even their dreams stopped.

  His initial mistake—afterwards he realized that—was his first return to France. Then the idea, the vague shape, the conception so huge that he had hardly dared to think of it until now, fixed itself in his mind as a reality; a united states of Europe allied with a united states of America, a brotherhood of man that at the most would take seven years to accomplish, and eventually, possibly before the end of the eighteenth century, would spread over the entire world. It would be a people’s government for the people, a government to see that no man starved and no man wanted, to see that hate and misery and crime disappeared through education and enlightenment, to see the iron grip of organized religion loosened, replaced by a gentle, deistic creed wherein the brotherhood of man turned its face to the singleness and goodness of God, a creed without hate or rancor or superstition. There would be an end of war, an end of kings and despots. Christ would come to earth in the simple goodness of all men—a goodness he believed in so fervently—and all men, turning their faces to God, would never lose sight of the vision.

  That was Paine’s dream, his conception—and one so awful and terrible and wonderful in its implications that he hardly dared speak it fully, even to himself. It depended on too much, the course of revolution in France, his power to sway men with the written word, the course of the post-revolutionary world in America—and finally the revolution in England.

  He recalled that he had crossed to France again, further arousing the suspicion of the Tories, who were beginning to believe that he was in league with the French. With Lafayette he had discussed the organization of a republican society that would eventually have world-wide ramifications. Madame Roland and Condorcet had joined in the nucleus, and Paine wrote a flaming proclamation of republicanism that raged against the king’s flight from Paris and called for his abdication. The British Tories still held back, and Paine began to believe that he could bring all his plans to a head without ever rousing the Tory government from its apathy. This was the first step—to the American republic would be added the republic of France. He did not know that even at that moment British agents were filing carefully written reports of his activities. He returned to England then and found that Paine, once deliberately ignored, had become an apostle of the devil.

  The forces of the government closed in slowly. England was rumbling, but they had heard her rumble before, and they judged the temper of the people well. If you crushed a revolt, you admitted a revolt, and then the demon could never be forced back into the bottle. On the other hand, if you implied, intimidated, threatened softly, arrested secretly, you could destroy a revolt before it ever realized its own strength. America had taught them a lesson.

  Paine’s friends and supporters had planned a meeting at an inn called the Crown and Anchor—where they would drink to the second anniversary of the downfall of the feudal system in France. A government agent saw the landlord, and suddenly the inn was not available. Clewes disappeared; a man called Luneden, who had approached Paine with an idea for an unofficial militia group modeled after the Associators of Philadelphia, was found dead in a ditch near Dover. Masterson, the ironworker, was arrested on a trumped-up charge. On the other hand, young Lord Edward Fitzgerald of Ireland, told Paine:

  “Think on the green isle when you want for fighting men, Mr. Paine, and it might be that you’d find more than enough.”

  “Whatever happens,” he told himself, “I must write, explain, make this thing clear.” He did a second part to The Rights of Man. His bridge was forgotten, his dreams of scientific and social glory so much in the past that he wondered how he could ever have entertained them. It was the old Paine now, not too well dressed, his twisted eyes gleaming, darting rapidly as he talked, his broad,, powerful shoulders bent again,, as if the burden they carried was heavy, terribly heavy.

  He wrote quickly, now that most of his doubts were gone. The first part had been a handbook for revolution, and this would be a plan—elementary and crude—but a sort of plan nevertheless for the new world he dreamed of. While writing, he knew that he was being watched, and he expected some interference from the government; when there was none, he was more wary than surprised. Then Chapman, the wealthy publisher, came and asked whether Paine would agree to his issuing the second Rights of Man.

  “Clumsy,” Paine thought, “oh, my lord, how clumsy.” And he said, “I publish with Jordan.”

  “Jordan is nobody,” Chapman replied smugly. “Jordan is a little mouse gnawing at the edges of the publishing cloth. A work with the strength and importance of yours, Mr. Paine, deserves nothing but the best imprint, the finest paper, and a binding a writer can be proud of. You and I are men of the world, and we know that the buying public, fools that they are, judge a book by its cover; the best Morocco, the most exquisite tooling—”

  “I publish with Jordan,” Paine smiled. “There are some who have said, and not too quietly, Mr. Chapman, that my work touches on treason. A publisher of your standing—”

  “Risks are a part of publishing. We champion the printed word, the freedom of the press.”

  “And the arrangements?”

  “A hundred guineas for all rights.”

  “All rights?” Paine smiled. “No royalties?—Really, is my work worth so little?”

  “I mentioned the risks. You will admit—”

  “I publish with Jordan,” Paine said.

  “Two hundred guineas.”

  “Then my work increases in value. Would you also purchase the right to hand my manuscript over to Mr. Walpole once the price is paid?”

  Mr. Chapman kept his temper admirably. “Five hundred guineas, Mr. Paine,” he said.

  “A writer’s life is never dull,” Paine laughed. “Go to hell, Mr. Chapman.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Paine. I’ll give you a thousand guineas, not a penny more.”

  “Go to hell!”

  “I warn you, Paine, take the thousand. A man hanged by the neck has no use for money.”

  “Get out before I throw you out,” Paine said.

  That settled Chapman, but not other things. When Paine brought the manuscript to Jordan, the printer said, “I don’t frighten easily, but things are tightening. Do you remember Carstairs, who took a thousand of the cheap edition for Scotland? He was found at the bottom of a cliff with his neck broken—mountain climbing—When has he climbed mountains?”

  “Don’t you think I see them tightening?” Paine growled.

  “I’m not afraid, mind you.”

  Paine gave him a written statement, in which the author declared himself to be the publisher—and said that he and no other would answer for what The Rights of Man contained.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Jordan protested.

  “I want to.”

  “And don’t walk the streets at night.”

  Paine smiled, recalling other times when that same warning had been flung at him.

  Then, with startling suddenness, it came to an end. All the carefully organized revolutionary cells, miners in Wales, cutlers in Sheffield, the dock workers at Liverpool and Tyne, the potters and the wheelwrights—all these who had looked for Paine’s leadership were cracked wide open by the government, before he had had a chance to call a congress, to order a
rising of militia, before the thin threads of revolution were even in shape to be drawn together. Then as an anticlimax, there came a message from Jordan.

  Paine went as quickly as he could. He had just heard of the arrest of the leaders of four of the cells; he was ready for anything, but he could not smile when the tall printer showed him an order commanding him, Jordan, to appear at the Court of King’s Bench. The charge was treason to the Crown, as of the publication of a criminal book called Rights of Man.

  “I’ll answer it,” Paine said.

  “You will not,” Jordan told him firmly. “If they hang you, that’s the end of everything; if they hang me, it’s much ado about nothing—you see, Paine, you’ve been here and there and everywhere, knocking about, and as you say, the world is your village. But I’m an Englishman, that’s all, pure and simple, and I have a crazy liking for this little island and the people on it. I see them going like horses chained to carts, and I want to cut the traces. That’s why I published your book—and that’s why I am going to die for it, plain and simple, if I have to. You’re the revolution, I’m a printer; that’s all, Paine.”

  Paine pleaded, but he had met a man more stubborn than himself. He went to his Whig liberal friends to plead, but the few doors not locked to him opened to reveal bland, ironical faces that told him:

  “But really, Paine, you never imagined we’d countenance revolution. Really, we are British, you know—” And advice, “Get out of England before you’re hanged.”

  Romney sent him a message, “They’re going to hang you, Paine, sure as God.”

  Blake wrote him, “Paine, for god’s sake, flee.”

  He issued a manifesto to the cells that remained, and only a dead silence greeted him. “This is the time to act,” he wrote, and there was only a dead silence.

  The next move of the government was a royal proclamation which forbade all unauthorized meetings and all seditious writings. Anyone knowing of such and not reporting them would be open to prosecution.

  But the book was selling, madly, wildly, by the thousands. In the small time left, Jordan kept the presses going day and night; the written word, once launched, could not be reclaimed, not by all the power of the crown. And Paine wrote constantly, letters, proclamations, appeals—if the cells had failed him, he would go to the people. And the people read his appeals, whispered among themselves, and did nothing. They were not the armed farmers of Massachusetts, but poor, frightened peasants and shopkeepers.

  Thus it was over. Blake, in an hour of pleading, convinced him that final orders had gone through; Frost came with news that a warrant had been issued. And a messenger from France pleaded:

  “See this, Paine. France needs you. In England everything is done, and when you are dead, the hopes of the English people will be dead, too dead to ever be raised, I tell you, Paine. In France, it is beginning, and when the name of the Republic of France sounds through Europe, the people of England will find their strength. But don’t stay here to be hanged.”

  “Running away,” he told himself. “When I could stay and die. But I’m an old man. In seventy-six, I was young, and there were other young men with guns in their hands—and I could talk to them. And where are they now?”

  And he told himself, “I’ll come back!” He swore to himself, “I’ll come back—only seven years at the most, and there’ll be brotherhood among men who have never known anything but hate and fear. The dead never come back, but I’ll return.…”

  All that he turned over and over in his mind, standing on the Channel boat and watching the white cliffs of Dover fade, on a fall morning in September, 1792.

  12

  THE REPUBLIC OF FRANCE

  IT WAS always the beginning. The cold, fresh wind blowing across the Channel was a tonic, the blue sky, the gulls, the sway of deck under his feet, and the breathless exhilaration that comes to someone who has narrowly escaped death. His mood changed and the black despair lifted, and his failure in England took its place in the natural order of things; for thousands of years of recorded history, it had been the other way, and a brotherhood of man does not come in hours nor in days. He would return to England with a United States of Europe at his back, and then the people would rise triumphantly at his call. How long? Five years, ten years; he was only fifty-five. Always until now, it had been training, training, and more training; he was Paine, the champion of man.

  He said to Frost, “Do I look old?”

  “You never looked better,” Frost answered, somewhat surprised, now that he had thought of it.

  “Tired?”

  “Hardly—”

  “What are you afraid of, Frost?”

  “A man doesn’t miss being hanged by the neck by inches, and smile at it.”

  “Don’t be a fool! Your life is nothing, just a little makeshift that you play with for a while, a machine that you put to use. And if something cracks it, then it’s cracked, that’s all.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t see things that way,” Frost said bitterly. “That was my home,” nodding over his shoulder at England. “Now it’s gone, now I don’t come back.”

  Taking the young man by the shoulder, Paine waved an arm at Europe and said, “That’s bigger—that’s all the world. I have nothing, not a shilling from my book”—what there was, he had left with Jordan—“not a penny in my pockets, just a rag in my valise and the clothes on my back. And I’m fifty-five and I’m not afraid.”

  As they made the coast of France, one of those quick, dark Channel storms blew up, and it was raining when they docked. But notwithstanding the weather, almost the whole of Calais turned out to welcome Paine, a file of soldiers, fife and drum squealing first the Marseillaise and then Yankee Doodle, apparently under the impression that it was the revolutionary anthem of America. The citizens cheered and whistled and waved their arms at the astounded Paine, who had expected nothing like this.

  “Vive Paine!”

  The soldiers marched back and forth and back and forth, and Captain Dumont, half Paine’s size, embraced him time after time. Then there was the mayor to give his embrace, and then four councilmen, then two lieutenants of the national guard. They informed Paine, first in French and then in very bad English, that he was deputy to the National Assembly—and from Calais, the honor, to them, of course, the overwhelming honor.

  “I am most honored,” Paine murmured in English. French, which he could hardly understand, flew about his ears. He could not speak now, and his eyes were wet; they wept with him, wept and cheered and wept again.

  “If you accept,” they said. “Naturally, only if you accept. The pay, eighteen francs a day, it is nothing, for you less than nothing. But to have Calais represented by Paine—”

  He nodded, and they bore him away to a banquet they had prepared.

  There was dead quiet at first as Paine walked in to the Assembly to take his seat. All eyes turned on him as news of who he was sped about, there was a soft murmur, hats were removed and heads bent in a completely French gesture of honor, even of worship, and then soaring acclaim as the voices rose. This was Paine and this was Paris and this was the revolution—and he had come home.

  He sat down and wept, and all over the hall they wept with him. He arose, and they drowned his voice in another blast of sound—and then all order vanished as they rushed to embrace him.

  That was one thing; he was Paine, the stepchild of revolution; not of the parlor variety, but a man who had given his propaganda to revolutionary soldiers at first hand, marched with them, fought with them, engineered a workers’ revolt in Philadelphia, and guarded like a madman those liberties America fought for. That was one thing; Paine, who would make the world over, was another.

  Paine who would make a world over could not speak French—yes, a few words, ask for a cup of coffee, ask for a piece of bread, a night’s lodging, but no French at all to handle swift political talk, the rushing, frenzied French of Paris; and is the language of freedom universal?

  In the days that followed he was
to be reminded again and again of what Lafayette had said to him, not so long ago:

  “Friend Paine, I think that you and I both were born too soon—and that we will have to pay for it.”

  But a man is not born too soon, Paine had smiled. The world waits for men and dreamers, so how can a man be born too soon?

  Yet he thought often of what Lafayette had said. Paine’s handbook of revolution was made in America, among long, drawling farmers who were slow to speech, slow to action, but not turned once they were on their way. You declared a liberty and you fought for it. Men died and men suffered, but the world became a better world—or so you hoped. Your comrades were Washington and Jefferson, and Peale and Anthony Wayne and Nathanael Greene and Timothy Mat-lack, and even the workers rising in a city were not a mob. And then you conceived an idea, a dream of a whole world a republic, and you tried to make a revolution in England—and you fled for your life but were welcomed in France, where a revolution was being made. It was still the beginning.

  But was it? The Legislative Assembly dissolved, he sat in the National Convention. His friends were called the Girondins, liberals headed by Condorcet and Madame Roland; he was with them, naturally, they were his old friends, they had listened to his ideas, his orderly presentation of the revolution in America. Yet their stock was falling lower and lower as the Jacobins, called the party of the Mountain, gained a firmer hold on the poor of Paris, crying for their dictatorship of the city over the provinces. For Paine, it was confusion where there should have been order—ominous confusion. There had to be a representative Congress, regardless of the impotence or corruption of that Congress. He didn’t understand the endless ramifications; freedom was freedom, and once you had gained power, it was a simple thing to arrive at. And here was France being invaded by foreign armies, being threatened by traitors within and traitors without, being threatened by starvation, fighting herself, party of the Plain, the Mountain, Girondins, the left and the right and the center. And why? why? he kept asking. They all had only one enemy—power, privilege, aristocracy. That must be crushed, and there must be only a party of freedom.