5

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONIST

OUT OF it, the noise, the tumult, the strange story that the rider brought down from New England, was coming something new, something colossal and beyond understanding, something that could be translated into movement and action, but not into plan and reason. So Tom Paine thought the next day, standing as one of the surging mob in front of the State House, the biggest mob in all the history of Philadelphia, almost eight thousand people. The mob was a mob and no more; it yelled, shouted, flurried, eddied, and quieted partially now and again to listen to various speakers who climbed up to denounce tyrants and oppression, both very general and very safe terms. Predominantly, the mob was pro-Boston in sentiment, but here and there. a Tory stood, smiling the way Tories were prone to smile these past several months.

For all that speakers were addressing the whole mob, smaller fry competed in their own particular circle, and Jackson Earle, a journeyman wheelwright, who was delivering a furious indictment of kings and tyrants in general, and one king in particular, called upon Paine to be his witness.

“Tom,” he demanded, “do we have over us a German or an Englishman?”

Paine shrugged. Yesterday had excited and terrified him, but today he was cold, and the old lassitude was returning. He had dreamed one brief, bright vision, and he didn’t know now why this crowd was helping it to dissipate. Yet he knew one thing, that he was outside of it; he was Paine, the editor, he had been Paine, the beggar, but in both stages, he had nothing. He could hate and squirm and protest, but how could he dream?

“George, I mean,” Earle persisted.

“German, I suppose.”

“German! And what manner of a German?” Earle asked the crowd. “A slaving Hanoverian, a fat, guzzling swine—and his is the divine right! From God? Now listen, my good friends, and I’ll tell you! Put me in God’s place—”

The speaker, Quincy Lee, perched on an impromptu platform of boxes, was begging for quiet. Arnold, who was a Quaker, had just proposed a militia, armed. “And what of it?” Lee yelled at the top of his lungs, a tall, gangling, crosseyed man, hopping with excitement. “What have the people to say?”

The crowd roared.

“Who will be the first to step up and offer, as I offer, my life, my arms, my sword for this sacred thing called freedom—”

How the crowd roared!

“As they died at Lexington and Concord—”

As Paine pushed out of the crowd, Arnold was crying, “As Englishmen have always fought for the rights of Englishmen—”

“Drinking?” Aitken said to him as he came in out of the cool, starlit night.

“Drinking,” Paine nodded.

“Yer liver will be so rotten ye’ll no’ have it in you long.”

Paine grinned and nodded again.

“Were ye at the square today?”

“I was there,” Paine said, dropping into a chair and staring at his feet.

“And were ye happy now that ye got yer blood and thunder?”

“I was not happy,” Paine said. “I was afraid.”

“Then ye’re drunk. My little man, ye’re good on paper, but bad with a clenched fist.”

“I wasn’t afraid of that.”

“Ye should no’ be.” The Scotsman had settled his long form back against the counter, and now was taking a savage delight in prodding his editor. “Ye should no’ be, I tell ye, for what is yer life worth?”

“Nothing.”

“Ah, then—and ye admit it?”

“I know it,” Paine said savagely.

“But ye’re afraid.”

Someone knocked at the door, and Aitken broke off his attack to answer. It was an old man whom Paine knew by sight, Isaac de Heroz, the beadle of the Jewish congregation. Under his arm he carried a tattered prayer book, which, after bowing in slow greeting to both Paine and the Scotsman, he spread on the counter, handling the loose pages gently and lovingly.

“Can you print one like it?” he asked Aitken.

Both Paine and Aitken bent over the book, Paine looking curiously at the first Hebrew writing he had ever seen, Aitken squinting at the old type.

“I have no’ the letters nor the skill.”

“I have some type, not all. The rest you can cast. You set as they are set.”

“And what is the meaning? I will no’ set a devil’s concoction.”

“They are prayers,” the old man smiled.

“I would no’ set a Papish prayer,” Aitken said doggedly. “I would no’ set a heathen prayer. Yet ye ask me to break my neck contriving the letters.”

“They are simple prayers that anyone could understand,” the old man said softly.

“Read that in English,” Aitken said, turning the pages and pointing at random.

The old man read,

“These things I do remember: O I pour

my soul out for them. All the ages long

hatred pursueth us; through all the years

ignorance like a monster hath devoured

our martyrs as in one long day of blood.

Rulers have risen through the endless years,

oppressive, savage in their witless power,

filled with a futile thought: to make an end

of that which God hath cherished. There was once

a tyrant searching in the Book of God

For some word there to serve him as a sword

to slay us; and he found the line which spake:

‘He that doth steal a man and selleth him,

he shall be surely put to death—’”

Paine stopped him, putting a hand on the old man’s arm. “That’s enough, father, we’ll print it.”

Aitken, who was going to say something, looked at Paine and stayed quiet, and Paine asked the old man, “Were you at the State House today?”

“I was there.”

“And what did you think?”

“I thought that this is the beginning of something long and hard.”

That night, past midnight, hours after the old man had gone, Paine sat and watched Aitken wrestle with the Hebrew characters and curse under his breath.

“Go to bed,” Aitken told him for the fifth time.

“I’m in no mood for sleep.”

“I ought to give ye notice, getting me into this hell’s broth.”

Paine wanted desperately to talk; he wanted a human being to sound to his thoughts; he wanted to hear laughter and tears, song and music.

“Have you ever loved a woman?” he asked Aitken.

“Are ye daft?”

He wanted to find a part of his past he could take something from, and then give it to another before it vanished like smoke.

Paine had been a staymaker in Thetford, in London, in Dover, in Sandwich, in Portsmouth and Brighton in the south, at Bath, at Winchester, at Bristol—no place could hold him. Always when he tried another trade, it was back to stays, from weaving, cobbling, carving, sewing, digging, plowing, planting, it was back to stays, which was his place. And it was at Sandwich that he saw Mary Lambert.

She was plump, saucy, pretty in a way; she had a dimple in either cheek, brown eyes, round arms, and she was a few years younger than he. At that time, he was twenty-one.

She was in service, and the first time he saw her, she was out buying chops. She wasn’t the kind to be content with looking at her meat; she felt it, pinched it, and then spoke up to the shopkeeper, “Now, mind you, not all fat. I won’t be cheated.”

“They’re as pretty chops as you ever seen,” the butcher said.

“Coo! I should have a shilling for all I seen better!”

“One dozen.”

“And cut the fat, mind you.”

All this time Paine was staring at her, and she knew it, staring and forgetting why he had come into the shop, whether to buy a piece of meat for his supper, or a bone for the dog he had at that time, or because he had known that she would be there and then nothing on earth could keep him away.

As she left, he followed her, not hearkening to the butcher’s, “’Ere you, what do you want?” walking after her some twenty feet before she turned and faced him and told him,

“Be on your way.”

Paine stood foolishly and dumbly.

“Now get on! I want nothing of your sort.”

“I meant no harm,” Paine said.

“Cool” she snapped, and turned on her heels and strode along, Paine after her, Paine catching up and begging, “Please, tell me your name.”

“Tell you my name! And what else should I tell you?”

“Let me carry your bundles, please.”

“I’m well enough able. And get along and keep a clean nose, or I’ll have a word to my master about you.”

He saw her again; it was impossible not to in a little place like Sandwich. He asked about her, and discovered that her name was Mary Lambert. Of course, she knew; he couldn’t keep away from her, but followed her, stalked her, even managed to say a word to her now and again. When she smiled at him, as she sometimes did, he would be in an ecstasy of delight. His master at that time, John Greeg, took to winking at him, poking him in the ribs, and putting a tongue in his cheek.

“Eh, Tom, you be a sly un, but I know.”

He was hopelessly, madly in love, and at something like that would only smile foolishly.

“Eee—un got an arm around ’er yet? I’ll be putting ye up a shilling.”

Sometimes she let him walk with her. He had taken to buying her things because he found she was more tractable toward him when he gave her a gift. He had asked her to walk down toward the stream with him one quiet evening, to which she said, “Coo, it’s softy, dirty marsh!”

“It’s pretty there. And you’re so beautiful—”

“You’re a funny un, you are, Master Paine. Ain’t you not had a girl before?”

He screwed up his courage and said, “Not one I loved.”

She shrugged her shoulders and tossed her head.

“Mary—”

“I like to walk in town,” she said. “A maid shouldn’t be off alone.”

“Mary, don’t you care for me, a little?”

“Maybe.”

“Mary!”

She began to ramble on about the house, her mistress, the second housemaid, the cook, the footman who was quite crazy about her. “Bussed me yesterday, ’e did,” she said.

“Mary, I love you!”

“Coo!” she smiled.

He asked her once about being in service.

“I always been with quality,” she said.

“But did you like it, being a servant?”

She bristled. “It’s better than some I knows ain’t got the graces to go in service.”

“I didn’t mean any wrong,” he apologized. “Only I don’t like to think of you as a servant.”

“Think what you please.”

“I love you.”

She tossed her head.

“Doesn’t that mean anything? I tell you I love you, I tell you I’d be willing to die for you—I’m not just a staymaker. I want to do things and be things; I want the whole world and I want to give it to you!”

“Coo!”

“I can give it to you,” he said fiercely.

She placed her hands on her hips and dropped a curtsey. “Master Duke!”

He tried to kiss her, and she slapped his face with all her might. He stood there and stared at her and rubbed his cheek and thought of the footman.

“High and mighty,” she snapped. “Just a corsetmaker, but them in service ain’t fit to be with you.”

“You hate me, don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

Then he made up his mind that he would never look at her again, and for two weeks he managed not to see her, muttering at his work, black and hopeless.

“Get an arm around un,” Master Greeg advised him.

“Shut up and go to the devil.”

“I’ll dock ye that shilling.”

The black mood passed, and he had a fit of tremendous resolve. He would set up for himself. Carefully, he had laid by nineteen pounds, and now he left Greeg, took an old shop, and moved his tools and bench in. Morning until night he worked, putting by every penny he could save, denying himself food, denying himself every little bit of comfort a man could have, drink, things to read, dreaming only of the day when he could afford to marry the woman he loved. And then he sought her out and asked her.

“I knew ye’d come back,” she said smugly.

“Yes, I had to.”

“Then mind you behave.”

“I want to marry you,” he said desperately.

“Coo!”

“I love you, I’ll do anything for you, I’ll make you happy—”

“Go on.” But she was weakening; this was better than the footman, who had never proposed marriage, better than the butcher’s way, better than her master who would catch her in the pantry; for a moment the twisted, burning eyes of the staymaker captured and held her, and in her small, fluttering mind she formed one glimpse of half-born dreams. She smiled and dropped a curtsey, and Tom Paine’s soul reeled with gorgeous triumph.

“Kiss me, go on,” she said.

He held her in his arms and the world was his.

“And mind, no nonsense about being in service.”

“No, no, you’re the whole world for me! Do I care what you’ve been. You’ll be Tom Paine’s wife now and I’ll put you high as a duchess—higher!”

“Go on.”

“I’ll be rich. I won’t always be a staymaker!”

“High and mighty for you— Eee, you’re a strange one.”

“You care a little,” he begged her.

“Mind you, marriage.”

“Yes, yes, my love, my darling.”

“You are a chap for words,” she said admiringly.

“They don’t mean much; they’re cheap. We’ll have more, we’ll have children.”

“Mouths to feed. Things come high,” she pointed out, making a face.

“If only you love me—”

“Maybe,” she pouted.

He thought afterward that if certain things had not been, if certain things had gone otherwise, it might have been different. What she was, she couldn’t help, and knowing that only made it worse for him. Long after, he would think of how he had tried to teach her to read and write, and how after ten or fifteen minutes of struggling with an idea, she would turn on him with childish fury. Sometimes he was sure she hated him, and sometimes, holding her in his arms, he would have a brief moment in which he knew she loved him. She was what she was, beaten into shape by her tiny world, a tribal creature laid over and over with a thousand taboos. Sometimes, probing as gently as he could, uncovering layer after layer, he would be at the point of finding her frightened little soul, and she would burst out at him, “Coo! High and mighty and fine you are, making fun of me again, you with your fine airs!”

“I have no airs, Mary darling.”

“Acting like a duke, and you a corsetmaker.”

He would shrug and nod and tell her that he was sorry.

“Scornful of service you are, and I was that comfortable there, with gentlefolk too, not your dirty pigpen quality!” Or if she really became enraged, she would tell him details concerning the footman, her master, others, pouring it on to see him squirm and twist.

Nothing went right with his business. Staymaking was a long-term trade, and unless you had quality on your list you could just as well give up. There was not enough business in Sandwich to support two staymakers, and when Paine could no longer pay his rent, when he was down to his last crown piece, he went back to Greeg.

“You be na a steady un,” Greeg said stolidly, and that was the end of it.

They were given their eviction notice, and Paine said, “We’ll try another town.”

“And I was to be higher than a duchess,” she mimicked him.

“Things go up and down,” Paine said quietly. “I’m not beaten.” But for the first time in his life he felt old, he at twenty-two, longing for a childhood he had never known, caught in the cage and racing round and round, like a squirrel on a treadmill. This time he expected her to go back into service, but she stuck with him, berating herself for it, giving him worse, yet caught by the glimpse of a dream she once had known, hating him for his ugliness, for his gangling insufficiency, for his hopelessness as a man of any practical affairs, but at the same time in awe of him.

The other town was no better, and then it was a third, the two of them trudging along the dusty highroad, Paine with his tools on his back, Mary with everything else they owned tied together in a kerchief. For Paine there was only a deep and abiding sense of guilt, and if Mary screamed at him, “It’s your fault, your fault, I was that comfortable and that well,” he could only nod his head. “Not even able to keep a roof over my head!” Yes, that was true. “Fine ideas, fine ideas, fine ideas! Looking down your big nose at me in service! Going to change the world, you are, coo, Master Tom Paine—ye dirty, lazy lout!”

They would lie behind a hedge at night, with the cool mist of evening settling on them, with all the sweet, late smells of the English countryside riding the dark winds, and if it was quite cool she would move close to him, and for a brief time there would be peace. He could hold her and say to himself, I am in my castle, my home, and she would be sleepy enough to give in and hold her tongue. His love was so fierce and desperate, challenging God—you gave me this, she’s mine and beautiful and lovely, and I can make her into what I desire, that every movement of hers, every whimper, every twitch of fright struck a deep chord of pain in him. He didn’t blame her, but only himself; something deep and terrible inside of him gave him the power to look at the world and know, to see justice and injustice, and feel in his own soul the whip laid on the backs of millions. He was twenty-two and he was old, and what wasn’t broken inside of him was being forged into a hard core of steel; but she was just a child, and at night when she was asleep, he would croon softly over her, “My baby, my little one, my darling.”

He stole that they might eat, and that gave her a stronger club to hold over his head, so that in her fury she would scream, “I’ll give you to the sheriff, ye dirty poacher!” The penalty was death. He crept into a barn and took a sack of turnips. The penalty was to be drawn apart by two teams of horses. He killed a rabbit, and for that the penalty was to have his ears and nose removed. But he would have murdered, killed in cold blood, his bitterness was such a growing, grinding thing; only toward her did he display any sweetness and mercy.

In Margate, where they finally arrived, footsore and weary, he talked his way into the lease of a shop. Mary was pregnant, and Paine’s desperation became almost a form of madness. All day he toiled over his bench, and at night hired himself out for whatever work there was. She was ailing so that the bitterness went out of her, and she whimpered and fretted like a hurt child. He didn’t eat, and one by one sold his precious tools to give her cream and fowl and now and then a piece of beefsteak with pudding; half starved, he could think of only one thing, to keep a roof over her head, a fire in the grate, and a little food in the pot. His trade, what there was of it, barely paid the rent, and his efforts to obtain other necessities became a sort of frenzy. He remembered Gin Row, put a patch over one eye, bound and twisted a limb, and begged through the streets. He was sure a leech could help his wife, and finally, with many threats and coaxings, got one to come to the shop for a shilling.

“Festering fever,” the leech said, while Mary looked at him, wide-eyed and frightened.

“What can you do?” Paine asked him, afterward and away from the bed.

“One performs and expects a certain amount of bloodletting,” the doctor remarked. “Docendo discimus of the evil vapors, the spirits that distend her veins. Haud longis intervallis the blood must flow—”

Paine shook his head wearily. “I don’t have Latin.”

“Ah, but medical terms, medical trade, medical mystery. Keep doors and windows close locked. When sickness comes, the devils dance like noxies.…”

That night she said, “Tommy, Tommy, I’m going for to die—”

“No, no, the doctor said you would be all right.”

All her spleen was gone, and she held onto his hand as if it was the last real thing on earth. And that night, white and wax-like from all the bleeding, she closed her eyes and turned her face away from Paine.

He sat all the next day, wide-eyed, silent, while the curious thronged the house, while the neighbors who had never taken any notice of them, poured in and out. He had no grief now, only a blazing anger that would burn within him forever.

West of the town of Philadelphia lay a green and rolling meadow called the Commons, and there Tom Paine made his way to watch the militia drill. He had thought of a mob before coming to the meadow on this placid, sunny spring afternoon, but this he saw was no mob. Neither was it an army, even in promise; neither was it anything the world had ever seen before, this group of men and boys, apprentices, journeymen, masters, clerks and students, smiths and millers, carpenters, weavers, barbers, printers, potters, men in aprons with the stain of their trade on their hands. These were the citizens of Philadelphia, yet not all the citizenry. The distinction eluded him, though it was there. Not that they were workingmen all, for there were masters and rich men as well as those who worked for hire; there was one banker, two mercers, a journalist, Tom Jaffers, who was rich enough to do nothing at all, three pastors, a grain speculator, and a fur buyer, to add to those who worked with their hands. There were Quakers, who were pacifists, Methodists, Puritans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Congregationalists, Dissenters, Diests, Agnostics, and Atheists. There were free blacks along with the whites, Negro slaves along with their masters.

What moved them? Paine wondered. What distinguished them? What had brought them together?

Slowly, he walked around the field, his heart racing with excitement, apprehension, fear too, withal a hopefulness he had never known before. He watched them drill with their own weapons, this awkward, stumbling, self-conscious first citizen army the world had ever known; firelocks they bore, great old muskets, bell-mouthed matchlocks that had come into the country more than a century ago, a few long, graceful rifles from the back counties, halberds, axes, pikes, cutlasses, rapiers, two-handed museum-piece swords, and those who had no weapon, not even a horse pistol, just sticks which they carried with dead seriousness. Some of them, those who had a shilling to spend strutting, already had uniforms, fantastically colored outfits with mighty cartridge boxes upon which was painted either “Liberty,” or “Freedom,” or “Death to Tyrants,” or some other slogan calculated to impress the world with their state of mind. Officers they had too, fat old Fritz van Goort for a colonel, little Jimmy Gains-way a captain, Captain Jacob Rust, the miller, and that only the beginning, for the officers’ list was near a mile long, with all of them shouting orders at once with no attempt at synchronization, left face, about face, forward march, halt, forward march, men poking into each other, being bowled over, stumbling, tripping, whole lines of men going over like tenpins, shouting, a musket firing by accident—of course, they all had them loaded, with shot, too.

Paine continued on his rounds, and there he was not alone, for a good half of the city had turned out to watch the militia in its first drill. The women stood in colorful clusters, umbrellas open to keep off the sun, the children ran back and forth screaming, and the old gaffers smoked their pipes and asked what the world was coming to. And the militiamen who saw their wives, sweethearts, or sisters, stopped their drill to wave or whistle. Sir Arnold Fitzhugh was the center of the Tory crowd, polite sneers and many silver snuff-boxes, and now and then a guffaw when the citizen soldiers did a particularly stupid thing. And when Paine approached them, Fitzhugh called merrily, “Well, scrivener, what do you think of our rebels?”

“I haven’t been able to think yet.”

“Blast me, hear that, he hasn’t been able to think yet.”

Pastor Blane, the Quaker, said, “I see thee are not with them, Tom.”

“No—”

“Scruples.”

“Doubts, I think,” Paine answered slowly, thinking that if he went ahead now, there would be no turning back, ever.

“Thee see what has happened to their scruples,” the pastor said, half sadly, half bitterly. “Eighteen of my flock in there. The Lord said, thou shalt not kill, but a Roman holiday is not to be turned aside from that easily, and now they are marching with sticks, as if the one worthy possession for a man were a gun.”

“The strangest part of America,” Paine said softly, “is that men have guns. When they shoot them off—”

“I don’t follow thee?”

“I don’t follow myself,” Paine shrugged.

Jacob Rust came to the print shop and said, “I want you in my company, Thomas, my boy.” He was a little fat man with a great booming voice.

“Yes?”

“A damned fine little force we’re going to have.”

“I’ll think about it,” Paine nodded.

“Is it something to think about?”

“Yes. There’s a devil of a lot to think about these days.”

“Now look, Master Thomas, you’re over from England these few months. People are going to ask, is he England or is he Pennsylvania? Does he smell sweet or does he stink?”

“I don’t mind my smell,” Paine grinned.

“But we do!”

“I don’t go the way the wind blows,” Paine said evenly.

“I know what I have to do, or I am beginning to. I wonder whether you do, Rust? I wonder whether you know what all this is?”

“It’s standing up for our rights as free Englishmen, by God!”

“Is it?”

“And we mean to fight for them!”

Paine shrugged and turned away.

And for some, nothing at all had changed. Paine went to a ball given by the Fairviews, wealthy importers of Tory leanings. They had him because he represented the Pennsylvania Magazine; Paine went because he had to have answers, many answers and coming from all sides, answers to his doubts, his longings, his prayers, his hatreds. Four pounds bought a coat of fine, brown broadcloth, a better garment than any he had ever put on his back. He wore a ruffle at his throat, a new white wig, and good leather breeches, a gentleman right enough with a stick and a three-cornered hat, invited to the best, stepping into quality on his own, into a hall lit by four hundred candles, where a Negro slave called melodiously, “Mister Thomas Paine!”

Four hundred candles, and heaven was never lighted brighter. Black servants walking with silver trays and silver punch bowls, mounds of dainty cookies and cakes, cold meat from twelve different kinds of game and enough Claret, Madeira and Port to float the British Navy. The women were in heavy, brocaded gowns, gilded, silvered, the men in lace and satin and velvet, and he was Mr. Thomas Paine, his opinion asked on everything.

“This Lexington business—of course, a rustic rabble, but here in town, did you see the beggars trying to drill?” They had all been to Europe at one time and another.

“And for one who’s seen the King Guards!”

“But, Mr. Paine, what line does an editor take, I mean, a man with a head on his shoulders?”

“I don’t fancy a rebellion—I don’t fancy anything more than a lot of noise and shouting.”

Mr. Paine said practically nothing.

“It doesn’t help trade.”

“On the other hand it does. People get frightened, and then they buy like mad.”

“Really, a straw in the wind. I fancy Lord North will take his sails in after he gives them a sound drubbing.”

“I read your magazine faithfully, Mr. Paine,” said a young woman, well-gowned, lovely, looking at him with admiration, he, Paine, the staymaker. “I read your poems,” she said. “I think they’re beautiful and that a man who writes poetry cannot help but have a soul, don’t you think?”

“I think many people have souls.”

“Do you? Now isn’t that frightfully clever. I can’t say clever things, but that’s frightfully clever.”

They had punch, cakes, and they walked in the gardens. There was a moon and stars, and finally she said how strange it was that he had never married.

“I was married.” After a moment or so, he said his wife had died.

“What a terrible tragedy!”

“Yes.”

“But don’t you think it made you a better, a broader man, Mr. Paine?”

“What?”

“You’re not listening to me at all, Mr. Paine.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?”

He wrote a piece for the magazine called Reflections on Titles. He was restrained. Again and again, he told himself, what happened to me does not matter. I must write as I think and know and reason and believe, so people will listen. They must listen.

He had it out with Aitken. Reflections on Titles struck at the privileged class and struck at them hard. He was not one of the mob, not one of the militia drilling on the Commons, not even one of the Congress party. Instead, alone, he groped in the dark and sought for direction, desperately and sometimes wildly. All the times before he had failed; now he must not fail.

“You will not print that,” Aitken said.

“But I will!”

“Then ye part from me!”

“If you want to let me go, let me go. No halfway measures,” Paine said.

He became persuasive. “Thomas, have we not always got together on one thing an’ another, notwithstanding the arguments?”

“Yes?”

“An’ why will ye be stirring in that devil’s broth of rebellion?”

“Do I print it?”

“Print it an’ be damned, an’ have yer notice!”

Paine shrugged. He had been given his notice before, and he no longer cared. He still worked with the Pennsylvania Magazine, and finally he had kicked it off the fence and bent it to his own purposes; but as a part of his life, it was over. What the next part of his life would be, he didn’t know, any more than he knew what would be here in America. It was not that he was animated by resolve so much as tension, and all that he could hope for was both nameless and formless.

On May the fifth, Benjamin Franklin returned to America, his mission in Europe over, all the long years there, considered politically, coming to nothing, an old man come home to a boiling country. He took up his residence at Market Street with the Baches, and there, after a few days, Paine managed to see him. Franklin had a half hour for Paine, no more; there were too many threads he had to pick up in America, too much to be done in too short a space of time. But he remembered Paine and shook his hand and said that he had been looking through the Pennsylvania Magazine; it was good; it was clever and it made bright reading.

“Do you like America?” Franklin asked.

Paine nodded; there was much he wanted to say, yet he didn’t know how to say it. Having thought to himself for so long that of all the men he had known, Franklin was the wisest, the deepest, and the best, he was now strangely dissatisfied, almost antagonistic.

“You’ve found yourself,” Franklin said.

That was trite, Paine thought, foolish almost. He had found nothing. “What is going to happen?” he asked Franklin. “Will there be war?”

“War? If fighting is war, yes. There has been fighting; there will be more.”

“But what does it come to?” Paine demanded, almost fiercely. His next thought was that it was cruel to badger this old man, this very tired old man. “Where are we going—?” For the first time, Paine felt and realized in himself a hard, driving cruelty. He didn’t have to ask where they were going; for himself, he was going only one way, and each day it shaped itself more clearly.

Franklin said, “We have to be strong, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? Once we are strong enough, the ministry will see reason. There’s no need for war, never any need for it. War is bad.”

“As one would say salt is salty,” Paine thought.

“We want our rights,” Franklin went on. “We want our freedoms, we want our decencies, our privilege to live a full and good life—that makes good men, the chance to work and put a shilling by, to have a piece of land and a roof overhead. We are not owned part and parcel by England; they must realize that partnership and conciliation—”

“And what of independence?” Paine asked.

“Do we want that?”

“I don’t know,” Paine said tiredly. “When I was a little boy, even then, I felt that certain things should not be. And when everyone else accepted those things, I thought I was mad, that the devil rode on my shoulders. Can you build anything good on a rotten foundation?”

“Old men don’t make revolutions.”

“My God, sir,” Paine said, “you’re not old! You gave me back my youth!”

The next week, a second Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia.

Once more men from all the colonies converged toward Philadelphia. The militia put on a show, and welcomed and welcomed, as if to prove that all their drilling was not for nothing. Back and forth they marched, until their feet ached, and those of them who could afford horses made a cavalry troop to ride out and meet the delegates. “God and Jesus,” men said to one another, “that we should live to see this, the port of Boston under siege by the British, the Congress back here in town, and old Ben Franklin still alive and here again.” They were back again, the Adams cousins, Hancock, Randolph of Virginia, Jefferson, this time with another Virginian, a big man who like a stage performer wore a magnificent uniform of buff and blue—he was a colonel of the Virginia militia and his face wasn’t familiar in Philadelphia; Washington was his name; he walked with long, gangling steps and hardly ever opened his mouth, shy, stupid perhaps. Paine was introduced to him by young Tom Jefferson; “Colonel George Washington of Virginia,” and Paine squinted at him.

“I’m glad to meet you, sir. Delegate?”

“I’m a writer,” Paine said, as if to justify himself. “I edit the Pennsylvania Magazine.”

“Yes, of course.” But obviously, he had never heard of the Pennsylvania Magazine. He stood silently, looking at Paine, as if he could think of nothing to say, and afterwards Jefferson explained, apologetically, “He’s very wealthy.”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps the wealthiest man in America, but land poor, like many of us Virginians. Not clever, but he has guts.”

“He wants to fight, and he doesn’t have to talk about it. People talk so damned much.”

“What makes you think he wants to fight?”

“The uniform. He’s not a clown.”

“I didn’t think of it that way,” Jefferson said. “He’s an enigma to me.”

Paine spent two days in his room, struggling to put down on paper what he thought. Then he went to listen to the Congress proclaim to the world that Americans had taken up arms for protection of their lives and property. Then he had beer with Sam Adams and Michael Closky, the expatriate Pole. Adams was violently furious, fanatically against compromise. Knowing he was despised by both the intellectuals and the gentlemen of the Congress, even by his cousin, John, he turned to these two whose violence, if not obvious, at least took strange directions.

“You know what you don’t want,” Paine said quietly, after listening to a half hour of Adams’ denunciation. “That’s only anarchy. What’s positive? There is fire burning in a dozen parts of this country, but what does the fire mean?”

It meant nothing, the Pole said. In his country it had been the same. Was this the first time the common man lifted up his head to revolt? Yet always it came to nothing.

“The halfway measures,” Paine said. “The fence sitters. I’ll go so far and no further—”

“How far will you go?” Adams asked him, peering curiously at this British staymaker, this broad, hulking, hook-nosed man with his slab-like peasant hands.

“All the way,” Paine said softly.

A little drunk, his stubble-covered face wavering in the light of the candle between them, Adams grinned like an imp and asked how far was all the way.

“I want a new world!”

“Utopia?” Adams said.

“God damn it, no! What we have here, a way of life, a way for children to smile, some freedom, some liberty, and hope for the future, men with rights, decent courts, decent laws. Men not afraid of poverty and women not afraid of childbirth—”

The Pole roared with laughter, but Adams’ face was suddenly serious. “Independence,” he said.

“For a beginning,” Paine agreed, sleepy suddenly, tired before and not after the act, seeing his whole life arranged and frightening in its clarity. Now doubt was almost gone. Doubt, built up so slowly and painfully, had resolved itself. He knew some of the answers, and in a little while, he would know the rest.