Citizen Tom Paine (16 page)

And then Morrison was shot through the head by a British sentry they stumbled over in the dark; the sentry, more frightened than Paine, ran away, and Paine, who had heard his first shot of war, took his friend's rifle and went on.

His way lost, his clothes soaked and dirty, he came into the light of a campfire where two deserters sat, boys of seventeen who snatched up their muskets and faced him like animals at bay:

“Who in hell are you?”

“Paine—Tom Paine.”

“And what do you want, god damn you?”

“The way to Fort Lee, that's all,” he said calmly, observing with speculative inward curiosity that he was not afraid of these two terrified children, not afraid but only deeply saddened and coming awake to the stuff his dreams were made of.

“That way,” they said, grinning, easier once they had him covered and saw that he was alone.

“Do we still hold it?”

They shook with laughter that was partly hysterical. “We hold it,” one of them said.

“Why did you run away?”

“You go to hell, you bastard, that's none of your business!”

“Why?”

And then the other lifted his shirt to show the fresh, raw marks of a lashing.

Like a low-crowned hat, Fort Lee sat on top of the Palisades, opposite Fort Washington on the Manhattan shore. The one was named after Charles Lee, the Englishman who had sold his services to the colonies for a substantial sum, who had been a professional soldier all his life, who lived on his own lush visions of glory; the other was named for a Virginia farmer who had blundered into the command of all the continental armies, and had, since August, been lashed by defeat after defeat. That farmer had already lost all of Manhattan to the enemy except Fort Washington and a few hundred acres of land surrounding it. He had been driven out of Manhattan and almost extinguished as a military factor at White Plains. He was now trying to regroup his shattered army and plan a campaign, and most of all make up his mind whether or not to abandon Fort Washington.

General Nathanael Greene, the handsome young Quaker in command of Fort Lee, believed that both points, facing each other across the Hudson River, could be held as long as was necessary. Rightly enough, he considered them a gate to the Hudson, and the Hudson a gate to the colonies. Now, at Fort Lee, he was informed that a man had arrived in camp who called himself Tom Paine.

“Paine?” Greene asked. He had a book, a small Bible called
Common Sense
, worn to pieces with two dozen readings. “Well, bring him here. Paine, you say? Of course, bring him here.”

“I know you and I don't know you,” Greene said to Paine, when they stood face to face, the one tall, sunburned, handsome and dapper in his buff and blue which he had had made in the style of his commander's Virginia militia uniform, the other broad and stocky, hook-nosed, hair in a knot and cheeks with three days' beard, his old clothes stained with dirt and blood. “You're Common Sense, aren't you?”

Paine nodded, and they shook hands. Greene, excited as a boy, called over his aides, introduced them, ran into his tent and brought out his own battered copy of Paine's book, ruffled the pages, smiling and trying to believe his eyes that Paine was here in front of him.

“You don't understand, of course—you don't know what this has meant to us. Everything, do you believe me?”

“I want to.”

“Good. You know we've been beaten, no use trying to hide that. We were driven out of Brooklyn and we were driven out of New York. All we hold in Manhattan is the fort, yet we have hopes of getting it all back, not military hopes entirely, but here, what you've given us, something to chew on and bite into, something solid and substantial that they can't take away from us. I've bought seventy-five copies myself and forced men to read them who have never opened a book in their lives—”

Paine shook his head dazedly.

“And now you're here. That's the wonder of it, your being here. I swear, sir, I'd rather have you than a regiment, and the general will say the same thing when he meets you.”

For a day, Paine was left alone. He told Greene that was what he wanted, to be left alone, to walk around the camp, to clean himself up, to think. There were a good many things he had to think about, he told Greene. Well, naturally, you'd expect that. “Do whatever you want to,” Greene said. “When you're ready, we'll talk.”

Paine wandered through the fort leisurely, always coming back to the high bluff where he could lean on the parapet of tree trunks and look across the dancing little waves of the Hudson to the green, wooded hills of Manhattan. Actually, Lee was more a bivouac than a fortification, poorly protected, but amazingly picturesque in its high setting over the river. Paine found talking to the men easier than he had expected; they were Yankees, many of them, from the little villages of middle New England, but it had been noised about the camp that he was the author of
Common Sense
, and they were pleased to find him as simple as they were. Working men themselves, they recognized in him all the signs of a man who has used his hands unsparingly, the sloping shoulders, the heavy palms and short fingers, the thick, muscular forearms. They talked to him about his book, and he was amazed to find how keenly they could analyze material facts, the trade of the colonies, the potential for ship building, for weaving, for manufacture. Ten minutes after meeting him, they would be relating tales that Greene could not have dragged out of them with torture; they told him about their parents, their wives, children, farms. So many of them were boys under twenty, red-cheeked children who knew whole pages of his book by heart.

“You remember, sir?” they would say.

And he wouldn't remember. Here was none of the comrade, the citizen, the self-conscious dramatization of the Associators, but rather a subdued realization of what it meant to face the best troops in the world and be defeated constantly.

“Yes, sir, you'll find it mighty pertinent,” and they would go on to quote him. “Now that matter of delegates to Congress, as you put it, I wouldn't take exception to it, Mr. Paine, but I might offer a mite of a suggestion. You speculate that Congress could choose a president—”

They were argumentative and keen and alive, but their education didn't include niceties. They were likely to pick their noses in a ruminative fashion, to chew tobacco and spit where it pleased them; they weren't clean. They were an abomination to the Virginians and Marylanders, with whom they bickered and fought constantly, and they couldn't get along with the Dutch.

Paine gave away Morrison's rifle. For himself, his old musket was good enough, and he was very doubtful of his ability to hit anything with it, even if he loaded with buckshot. He gave the long rifle to a Virginian who could use it.

When Greene had heard from Paine the full story of the Associators, he nodded and said, without passion, “Of course, it isn't the first time. That's happened in half a dozen places. It's happened with us, too, I suppose.”

“They weren't cowards,” Paine said.

“Men aren't cowards. It's a balance; either it's better to stay and fight, or it's better to run away.”

“They didn't have any direction,” Paine said. “They were molded by certain things for God knows how many hundreds of years, and how could you unmold them overnight? And they didn't have any leadership. Back in Philadelphia, Rush told me that revolution is a technique. What do we know about that technique?”

“Nothing—”

“And yet I can't get used to the idea that the cause is doomed. Do you think it's doomed?”

Greene said no, but not with assurance.

“No, of course, it's not doomed.” Paine shook his head and rubbed his heavy fingers into his brow. “Revolution is something new, we don't know how new it is. I sometimes think that April last year a new era for the world began.” He asked Greene how long it would be, how many years, and Greene said he didn't know, it might be twenty or a hundred years. They smiled at each other, Greene showing his large strong teeth, his blue eyes wrinkled in appreciation of the parts they both played in this curious comic opera. Paine was relieved to find someone saying what he had been thinking. Greene said he was glad that Paine was there.

“It means very little,” Paine protested.

“No, I'm trying to learn how to make a campaign, but what's the good if they don't know why they're fighting?”

“Do you think I can tell them?”

“I think so,” Greene nodded.

“All right.”

“Do you want an officership?” Greene inquired. “It can be arranged, you know. A captaincy, easily; you could be a colonel or a major if you wish to—we have so many of them, God knows.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“In a way, it's a matter of respect,” Greene said uncertainly.

“If I can't have their respect as Tom Paine, it's no good to me.”

“Yes—”

“You see, all I can give them are reasons. I don't know anything about fighting.”

He was in Hackensack when Fort Washington fell, dropping the ripe plum of three thousand men into the hands of the British. At Hackensack, five miles inland from Fort Lee, there was a larger encampment of the ragged continental troops, Jersey and Pennsylvania men, undisciplined, a swaggering, dirty, wretched camp that gave Paine a desolate reminder of the Philadelphia militia. The bivouac was overrun by camp-followers, women of all ages in all the stages of decay. The men kept chickens and pigs and spent their time earning the undying hatred of the local farmers. Greene had said to him, “Go there and see whether you can make those swine understand why they're fighting.”

The “swine” grinned at him when he spoke of the revolutionary army. They pelted him with mud when he tried to tell them why a man should want to die for this little civilization on the fringe of the forest, and for the first time in many years he used his fists. He was deceptively powerful, and his big shoulders hid layers of leathery muscle. They respected him when he had laid a few of them on their backs.

Henry Knox, the fat colonel of artillery who was in command of the camp, grinned appreciatively. “They understand that,” he said. He had been a bookseller once, had even done a little publishing on his own, and he considered Paine his own private gift from God, something to lessen the boredom. Talking about the fantastic success of
Common Sense
, he would keep Paine in his tent for hours, and having a good, solemn liking for the bottle, they were quietly and warmly drunk on many an evening. Knox was the last person in the world to be in command of this dirty, disorderly, mutinous camp, a fat, smiling young man of twenty-six, florid in complexion, talking constantly about his wife, and again and again pressing Paine for the story of the book's sale. Did it sell more than two hundred thousand? That was the story.

Paine didn't know; he wasn't sure and they had lost all track of printings. And then it had been printed everywhere without permission.

“But, man, man, there was a fortune in it,” Knox said.

“I suppose so.”

“And you didn't touch it. By God, that was magnificent!”

Paine shrugged, and then Knox began to speculate upon the number of readers there must have been. Possibly everyone in the colonies who was literate. Possibly a million readers, one of three persons—but that was hardly possible. Yet it was enough to stagger the imagination.

“And here?” Paine asked. “What do we do and where do we go?”

Knox said he didn't know; they were here and the British were across the river, and it seemed like it might be that way forever. It had been terrible at first, being beaten in every engagement, but now they were learning how to fight. Perhaps it didn't look that way, the camp being what it was, but they were learning—

That was only a few weeks before Fort Washington fell. The fort, standing on a bluff on the east bank of the Hudson, was supposedly impregnable. Greene thought so, and so did Knox; if Washington had his doubts, he kept them to himself, and it was only Charles Lee, commanding about five thousand men in Westchester, who said out and out that the fort could not be held. It couldn't; the hills around it were taken, the defenders rolled back, flanked, cut off from retreat, the fort filled so full of fleeing continentals that it could not even fire a shot in its defense. Some three thousand men were taken, and Washington, watching the whole thing from a boat in the Hudson, saw what little hope he had left crumble and disappear.

Paine met him again only a few days before the fort was taken, and the Virginian had said, almost desperately:

“It's good to have you with us here. They don't know in Philadelphia—they think it's a very simple matter to make a war and a revolution.”

Paine thanked him.

“Talk to the men,” Washington said. “Only talk to them and make them understand this thing.”

Then the fort was lost and the end was in sight. Paine sat stolidly and watched young Knox weep out his rage and disappointment, but when he turned to the Englishman for sympathy, Paine, in one of his rare bitter moods, snapped:

“You poor damn fool, did you expect nothing to happen? Did you expect them to give us America?”

“No, but the whole garrison—”

“And it will be more than three thousand men before we're finished. Don't be an idiot,” Paine said brutally. “Stop crying—is that all you're good for, tears?”

At Hackensack, the camp was dissolving; daily, there were more and more desertions. Paine went from man to man, pleaded, threatened, used his big fists; and they listened to him, because he wasn't an officer, because he was as unkempt and as ragged as any of them, because he could say a few words that would set a man's heart on fire. It was hard, and it was going to be harder; he admitted that, but they hadn't looked for a picnic, or had they? They weren't paid, well, neither was he, and he turned his pockets inside out to show them. Their shoes had holes in them, well, so had his. Then why? “I know what I'm doing,” he grinned. “I'm feathering my own nest.” How? Well, for one thing, he told them, the United States of America would be a good place to live in, comfortable, good for a working man. He knew; he had been a staymaker, cobbler, weaver, exciseman, down the whole line; for another, the enemy wasn't going to forget what had been until now. “Give up, and you'll pay the rest of your lives,” he told them. And once he wangled a keg of rum from the dwindling commissary and got drunk with them, the way they could understand, roaring, yelling drunk.