Citizen Tom Paine (24 page)

“I don't like that,” Rittenhouse said. “Freedom of the press—”

But the committee assured him that once the revolution had triumphed, there would be time enough for freedom of the press.

The committee had no power to punish, but it had a tremendous power for intimidation, and it was solidly supported by the rank and file of Philadelphia. It stored up its evidence for the coming election, and at a great public mass meeting, it presented its case against Morris. The following day, thoroughly frightened, Morris let his corner on flour fall to pieces.

From a meeting of the committee one night Paine walked home, suddenly as weak as a child, barely able to mount the rickety wooden stairs to his room. He lay on his bed, alternately hot and cold, trembling, delirious, plucking at his memory, whimpering sometimes, but too weak to light a fire in the hearth. All the next day he lay in bed in the same semi-conscious state, half the following day. Top many things were happening; for the moment Paine was forgotten. The tribunal sat over Philadelphia, and the city was frightened, angry, divided in itself. Mobs surged though the street by torchlight, and Peale's soldiers, spread too thin by far, tried vainly to keep order.

Roberdeau remembered the absent writer, and by that time Paine was almost dead, a haggard dirty figure in a foul and dirty chamber. When Paine regained consciousness, the first person he saw was Irene Roberdeau, and it was a dream, and this an angel. He said, “I'm dying—” but it didn't matter. He was too weak to feel anything but a lonely sort of happiness, only strong enough to resist Roberdeau's efforts to take him out of the place he called his home.

For nine days she stayed with him, an impersonal, competent nurse, and then Paine, who could stand it no longer, begged her to go. She went, and it was lonelier and bleaker than ever. When he got out of bed and looked into the bit of glass he called his mirror, it was not Paine who faced him, but a yellow mask stretched on jutting bones, hollow eyes, a monstrous nose, and long, scraggly, thinning hair.

While Paine lay sick, civil war raged in Philadelphia. He heard the gunshots of the pitched battle between Wilson's group and the constitutionalists. He heard, all through one night, the ragged sound of musketry, and wept like a baby because he was confined here, feeble, unable to move. And he was still sick when the state election swept the constitutionalists into a power beyond dispute.

Peale told him about it, and Paine nodded and tried to smile. “So long as we won,” he said.

Another dark winter dragged through; it was seventeen-eighty; part of the Pennsylvania Line mutinied, for lack of food, of pay, of clothing. Five long years they had been fighting, and they wanted to see their homes, their wives and their children. Charleston fell. The mutiny was put down. Washington poured his heart into begging letters, and Paine read them. He was clerk of the Assembly now. Washington wrote, “My dear Paine, is there nothing that can be done, nothing?”

The election had been very decisive. With the constitutionalists in power, Morris, Rush and other leaders of the Republican party threw in their hands. The counter-revolution had been blocked and broken, and it would not rise again for many years. Paine had to live somehow;
Crisis
papers could be written and printed, but the people who read them had not a penny to give the author. It was then that Roberdeau and Peale had offered Paine the position of clerk to the State Assembly, and Paine had taken it. “I hoped to go back to the army,” he apologized. He didn't have the strength; strangely, quietly, age crept up on him. His hair was graying, and the curious twisted eyes had a shadow of fear in them.

As clerk of the Assembly, he read an appeal from Washington: “… every idea you can form of our distresses will fall short of reality.…” To Pennsylvania, this was, when all else had failed; to the men who had taken power and organized the first revolutionary tribunal. “Such a combination of circumstances to exhaust the patience of the soldiery.… We see in every line of the army the most serious features of mutiny and sedition.…” To Paine, it was more than that, the tall Virginian pleading, “You, Paine, who did this thing with your pen—you who could talk to the men.” He was sick, and his hand trembled. The Assembly sat with dead features; afterwards, he would get drunk. The discussion was hopeless; a delegate saying, “What can we do?”; another putting it into different words.

He had a thousand dollars in continental money. He took half of it and made the first step of reconciliation with the party of finance. Sending the five hundred dollars to Blair McClenaghan, dealer in tobacco and linens, a Scot who had a grudging admiration for Paine, he suggested some sort of moving fund for the relief of Washington. The Scot mentioned the idea to Salomon, a small and rather mysterious Jew who made his headquarters in a coffee house on Front Street. It was rumored that Salomon had broken the wheat combine, that he had knocked the bottom out of the price for woolen blankets. At any rate, he was involved with the constitutionalists, whose chief financial backing came from Jews.

“Do it,” Salomon told the Scot. “It's the only thing—but I am not your man. I can spare a few thousand, five perhaps, but you'll need capital, a great deal of money. Go to Morris and Reed and Rush. I think they'll go in.”

“After the way Paine fought them? It's his idea.”

“After the way he fought them. They want it their revolution, but they don't want to lose the war.”

McGlenaghan went to Morris. Morris said bitterly, “I hate that man—but he's right. We're going under. If I can convince Wilson—”

“If you can—” the Scot smiled.

“Nevertheless, one day Mr. Paine will pay,” Morris said grimly. “We won't forget.”

The sum of hatred Paine had aroused was left for further collection, and that night, on the basis of his five hundred dollars continental, the Bank of Pennsylvania was organized to supply the army with food, clothes, and munitions.

Paine wrote
Crisis
papers in the same white heat, but he had to drink more and more to put the flame in his pen. Twice he went off to the army; old Common Sense was thinner, more haggard than ever, but the men welcomed him and still flung the cry at him, “My God, Tom, this don't make no sense whatever.” He explained patiently, again and again; they were his children, dirty, haggard, worn as he. Washington said to him, “Don't let me ever estimate, Paine, what you are worth.”

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.