6

HOW TOM PAINE WROTE A SMALL BOOK

HIS PARTING from Aitken was curiously mild, and for the first time Paine realized that the Scotsman held him in some esteem and regarded him with a certain affection. Aitken, whom Paine had considered as far removed from emotion as a human being can be, shook his head stubbornly, and at first, when he gave Paine his hand, was able to say nothing at all. Paine knew it was not entirely the impending doom of the Pennsylvania Magazine that moved him; the publication was doomed, not only through its loss of its editor, but because the rising upheaval in the colonies made it already an antique of some vaguely remembered epoch. This whole peaceful land, which went on without much appearance of change—as lands do even when the world begins to burn—was inwardly bubbling and boiling and preparing to explode. Paine thought that Aitken knew it, not as a Tory, nor even as a rebel, but as one who losing security would lose all reason to live. Paine pitied him.

“Ye will no’ change yer mind?” he asked.

That was not the question, as Paine knew. A pound a week was good pay and more than enough to keep him comfortably, and what with things he had written for other publications he had some twenty pounds to fall back on. Perhaps he was a fool to give it up, the more so since the course he planned was very vague.

“It is bread and butter,” Aitken pressed him.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Think it over, Thomas. Ye’ll be sucked in with the madmen, an’ it’s no’ Christian, Thomas. Let well enough alone.” But when Aitken saw he couldn’t persuade him, the Scotsman said gruffly, “Ye’ll no’ hold a grudge, Thomas?”

“Why should I?”

“There are mean men an’ there are sweet men, but ye no go in a category, Thomas.”

“I never held a grudge,” Paine said, “except against myself.”

Tall, slim, fair as a girl and as comely as Paine was ugly, Tom Jefferson won him heart and soul. Jefferson was a gentleman in Paine’s memory of the sharp division of things in England, and the Thetford staymaker’s first reaction was one of sullen hostility. Jefferson was graceful and handsome and accomplished and clever, all that Paine was not, and in his first advances Paine saw only some petty need for the favor of the magazine. The gall in his soul poured acid on Jefferson, and admiring the man, thrilling with pleasure if Jefferson so much as nodded at him, Paine’s outward reaction was only to try and turn the Virginian into an enemy. Jefferson wouldn’t become an enemy; God only knows what he saw in the graceless staymaker, whose hands always had dirt under their nails; but whatever it was made him want to find the man beneath the crust. He pretended not to see the point in Paine’s caustic remarks, and met the editor on such a basis of easy equality that bit by bit Paine’s reserve disappeared. Being one of the inner circle of the Congress, Jefferson knew everything, met everyone, and was able to smooth things considerably for Paine. A few years younger than Paine, he combined fresh youthfulness and maturity in a manner that was, for Paine at least, completely charming.

To share a pot of coffee with him was something that Paine looked forward to; dinner with him was sheer delight, and after an evening spent with him in front of a fire, Paine glowed with a warm happiness he had never known before. Slowly and deliberately, Jefferson drew from him as much as any man could of the story of his life; he had a wonderful knack of taking the confused memory and assembling it with meaning. He once said to Paine, “All in all, as it was, with the dirt, the privation, the misery, the gin and the utter hopelessness in the way you and those around you lived, that alone, terrible as it was, could have been endured—” The sentence hung in the air, and Paine tried to see what he was driving at.

“Poverty is a degree of things,” Jefferson said. “I have seen people here in America whose poverty was complete and absolute, yet they retained—”

“Dignity,” Paine said.

“Dignity.”

“Then that’s all we live for,” Paine reflected. “If there’s any meaning in human life, then it’s there, in the dignity of a human being.”

“I think so.”

“I never realized that before; I began to feel it here, but I didn’t know until I spoke of it tonight. It’s true though; all through ten thousand years men have been corrupted by having their dignity taken from them. When my wife died and the neighbors poured in to look at her poor, tired body, the little, evil thrill of it the only excitement in their lives, each bringing a scrap of food for admission, I could think, God help me, only of how comical it was. If we were made in the image of God, how rotten that image has become!”

Another time, Jefferson was giving a small dinner for George Washington and he asked Paine to come. Randolph was to be there, too, and at first Paine refused; he was frightened; he valued his relationship with Jefferson too much, and he was afraid he would make a fool of himself in front of the three Virginians whose culture, quality, and wealth were almost beyond his imagination. He had heard of Mount Vernon, Washington living there like a great feudal baron, with packs of hunting dogs, strings of horses, countless black slaves, rivers of wine, the “quality” coming and going endlessly, a coach that had cost two thousand pounds; he had heard of the Randolphs; certain Quakers of Philadelphia never tired telling tales of these three godless agnostics, and Paine had little basis upon which to separate the true from the false. What meaning for him or for any common man could a rebellion have if their kind were at the bottom of it? Wasn’t it all a clever cover for their desire to be freed from the dictatorship of the British tobacco agents, and weren’t they, as all their class, ruthless enough to spill a hundred thousand quarts of blood to see their great plantations thrive?

But at last he gave in to Jefferson’s urging, forswore himself to sullen silence, put on his best suit, his best wig, and came to the dinner. He was surprised at how eagerly they shook hands with him; they knew of him; they read the Pennsylvania Magazine, even Washington who, Paine had presumed, read nothing at all. Peyton Randolph, the eldest of the three, had an eager, inquiring air, as if he had looked forward to nothing so much as meeting Paine. Washington said little; he sat and listened with his chin on his hand when he wasn’t eating, his long face intent upon what was being said, his brow furrowed with a shade of annoyance now and again, perhaps most of it an impatience with his own lack of understanding. Jefferson took up the conversation and did most of the talking. Paine noticed that of the four, Washington drank the most and seemed least affected by what he drank.

Jefferson toyed with the idea of independence; as an intellectual concept it appealed to him, for it was filled with limitless and entrancing possibilities, but his manner of treating it was entirely objective, and Paine saw that he never considered it as any more than a dream. When he made a simile of a child being forced out of a house by his father, the child in this case being the colonies and the father England, Washington smiled, showing his bad teeth and said, “But he remains in the family.”

“Only by name.”

“Yet we are Englishmen, Virginians true enough, but Englishmen nevertheless,” nodding generously at Paine, their provincialism polite as it was narrow.

“Oh, damn it, we’re at war,” Randolph said impatiently. “Why don’t people realize that?”

“For our rights.”

“Rights! Rights! What are rights? Where do they begin and end?”

Jefferson laughed and said, “What do you think of rights, Mr. Paine?”

“I think there are no such things. I think that by right of birth all things belong to all men. You can take away rights, but you can’t give what belongs to all.”

“You make no exceptions, Mr. Paine?” Randolph asked.

“None!”

“Then you would reform England as well as America?”

“It’s not reform for men to claim what is theirs.”

“But it’s dangerous. You sound bloodthirsty, Mr. Paine.”

“I hate war,” Paine said slowly. “Of all ways to hold man in contempt and make a beast of him, war is the worst. There is nothing on earth I hate more than war.”

Paine wasn’t surprised when the Congress made Washington commander in chief of the rabble of Yankee farmers who lay like hungry wolves around Boston. There was something about the tall, dry-faced Virginian that made people trust him. “As they always trust stupidity,” the Philadelphia wits said. But Paine wasn’t certain of that, and on the day when Washington rode through the streets, cheered wildly, Paine stood in the crowd and tried to understand what dull, curious force in the man could draw out the admiration of these shouting fools.

Although a state of actual war was beginning to exist that summer of 1775, the people of Philadelphia could not take it quite seriously. For one thing, Massachusetts was so far away; for another, business was good. Even when news came to town that there had been a terrible, bloody battle fought in Boston, at a place called Breed’s Hill, and that the redcoat dead lay like pigs in a slaughtering pen, it did not seem quite real to Philadelphia. After their first rush of enthusiasm, the militia enlistments fell off sharply; the wags did caricatures of the citizen soldiers. The drills became sloppy affairs; the men came to resent their officers, and the whole scheme of a citizen army showed signs of going to pieces.

For Paine, those early summer days were leisurely and almost carefree. He had money enough for the first time in his life; his lodgings cost little, and a few shillings a day more than provided for him. His reputation with the magazine gave him enough of a name for him to sell an article here and there, and his reaction from the restrictions laid down on him by Aitken was to write quickly, purposefully, and better than ever before. He read a good deal, talked a good deal, and took to long, rambling walks along the river front. The Pennsylvania countryside, so like yet so different from England, fascinated him, and he would wander out into the hills, put up for the night at the stone house of some Dutch farmer, smoke a pipe, drink good homemade beer, and argue about everything from crops to government. With working-men he was able to drop the chip from his shoulder, and he, to whom good speech came with such difficulty, lapsed with ease into the broad Pennsylvania country drawl.

One day, hot and tired, he climbed over a stile into a farmyard where a buxom, fair-haired girl of twenty or twenty-one was drawing the buttermilk off her churn. “Could I have some?” Paine asked, and she poured some into a wooden mug and laughed at the way it ran from the corners of his mouth.

“Ah, you’re a dry one,” she said.

“Can I pay you?”

She laughed again and asked him whether he had come up out of Philadelphia.

“All the way,” he said proudly. It was a good twelve miles, and only here in America had he learned the deep pleasure of walking.

“You don’t look like a walker.”

“No—”

“What do you do?”

He told her he was a writer, and she smiled at him quizzically, as if a writer were the strangest thing that had ever come her way. Then, as easily and inoffensively as she had made his acquaintance, she dropped it and went back to her butter-making as if he had never existed, running off the milk and lifting the rich white butter out of the churn, molding it like clay in her strong freckled hands. Paine, comfortable, quite rested now, sprawled in the shade of a tree, entranced by the wonderful pattern the sun and the leaves made on his dusty clothes, stretched out his legs, drank his milk, and watched her beat the butter on the board. The farm was evidently a prosperous one, the fieldstone house square and solid as a fortress, the barn half stone, half timber, strong hand-hewn beams jutting from under the eaves. They had had their first haying, and the sweet-smelling stuff was piled in great heaps out on the fields and, beyond, the corn and oats were coming up as if they could not hasten from the earth soon enough. There was a pen full of rooting black and whites, and the chickens ran loose and aimless. Out in the fields, a half mile or so away, two men were working a team, and a fat pile of smoke ran from the chimney to show that things were doing inside.

When the girl had finished her butter, she lifted the board in her arms and said to Paine over her shoulder, “You may come in if you wish.” Her recollection of his presence was so casual and good-natured that he couldn’t help but follow her, and they went into a long, low-ceilinged kitchen where another woman, evidently the girl’s mother, was mixing a batter of dough.

At one side of the kitchen, there was a great hearth, full eight feet long, with a Dutch oven on either end. The floor of the kitchen was red brick, swept so clean you could eat off it, and down die center was a long sawbuck table. Two handmade benches flanked the fireplace; there was a wide sideboard, loaded to the shaking point with pewter and crockery. Those and several straight chairs made up the furnishings of the room, but from the ceiling hung smokings of ham and bacon and jerked venison and beef. And from one of the benches four tow-headed children, three boys and a girl, regarded Paine with a wide-eyed but reticent curiosity.

The girl said, “Mother, this here’s a writing man, walked up out of Philadelphia.”

Paine bowed and said, “My name is Thomas Paine, madam. I was hot and thirsty, and your daughter was good enough to give me a glass of buttermilk.”

“We have plenty of that,” the woman smiled, not leaving her work. She was past middle age, but broad-shouldered and strong, her sleeves rolled up, her large arms white with powder past the elbows. Her face, lined with work, was pleasant in its big, regular features. “Our name’s Rumpel,” she said. “That’s Sarah.” She pointed to the boys and called off, “Ephraim, Gideon, Samuel.” The little girl was Rachel. Then she went on with her work, and Paine sat down in a cool corner.

At noon, the long table was set. The farmer, Jacob Rumpel, clumped in with his hired man, shook hands with Paine, and sat down at the table. Without words, they had made it evident that he would stay and eat, and he had no desire to leave. Sarah set a place for him next to her father; when she looked at him there was a twinkle in her eyes, and now and again Paine had a feeling she was laughing at him. The children raced to the board, never taking their eyes off Paine, and the farmer, who had been turning the name over in his mind, said finally, “You be with that Pennsylvania Magazine.”

Paine nodded, somewhat pleased that they should know him here.

“I don’t hold with it!” Jacob snapped.

“Neither do I.”

“Then why are you not man enough to throw down your pen?”

“Father,” Sarah said, “your food will be cold.”

“I did.”

“Ah—”

“That’s why I can walk in the country,” Paine smiled.

Turning to him suddenly, the farmer demanded, “Were you thrown out or did you quit them?”

“Some of each.”

“I know Aitken, a tight man with a rope around his soul. He waves this way and that but lacks the guts to fall. Paine, there’s good men in writing and bad. I read Ben Franklin and Jim Hall. I read MacCullough and Tom Jefferson. I like a man with gall. I like a man—”

“Pay no attention to father,” Sarah said quietly.

“—who can look at a thing and say right or wrong. Right is right and wrong is wrong. I don’t hold with in-between. I reckon I side with the Boston men, what’s mine is mine so long as I got powder for my gun—” He Was a tall, lean, brown-faced man, with a bobbing apple in his throat and tiny blue eyes.

“Go an’ eat, Jacob,” his wife said.

For Paine, the Rumpels were a new and wonderful experience. There was nothing like them in England, and he was sure there was nothing quite like them anywhere else in the world. In wealth and possessions they were richer than many a squire at home, yet Jacob Rumpel worked with his hands and Hester Rumpel, his wife, did the cooking for the whole huge family. They were not peasants, yet they could not be put in the class of the English yeomen farmers. Their hired man sat down with them at the table as an equal, not as a servant, and the children shared in the chores as if they took pleasure in the mere act of labor.

Jacob Rumpel plowed his own fields, yet at night he read not only the Pennsylvania Magazine but Voltaire and Defoe. His wit was the wit of Poor Richard; Ben Franklin was his god and the greatest intellectual influence upon his life; and he could only philosophize in terms of action. He made his own candles, his own soap, his own cloth for which he raised his own flax and wool. The farm was his, but a younger brother had packed his possessions in a wagon and gone west into the lonely hills of Fincastle, and Rumpel took it for granted that some of his sons would do the same. His wife came of Puritan stock, but he himself was comfortably agnostic, not out of reason, but rather out of unbounded confidence in things that are. He and God walked the earth on even terms; he did what was right, and he was content with his doubts. He hated slave-holders, and he drank no tea out of principle, but his admiration for the Boston men, whom he considered in other ways a bloodless and intolerant breed, would not be translated into action until the redcoats marched on Pennsylvania soil. When Paine asked him what he would do then, he said, matter of factly, “Take my gun.”

“And the farm?”

“I reckon the farm’ll limp along.”

But after he had gone back to the farm half a dozen times, welcomed by Rumpel who was just naive enough to consider Paine a great figure in the intellectual life of Philadelphia, a favorite with the children to whom he told endless stories of highwaymen and privateers, Paine no longer denied to himself what brought him there so constantly. He was not in love with Sarah, not as love goes; inside he was dry and empty, and the memory of the serving girl who died in the shack in Margate hung like a stone around his neck.

But being with Sarah was compounded of peace and rest-fulness, and a content such as he had not known before. Indolence was something very new to him; unemployment he knew and starvation he knew, just as he knew poverty and drunkenness and squalor and all the shambling wrecks who did nothing because there was nothing for them to do. But the pleasure of sheer laziness, the sweet satisfaction of dawdling in a Pennsylvania summertime was as strange for him as was this curious family in their stone house with its foot-thick walls.

He would sit in the barnyard and watch the girl, or else in the kitchen where he told endless stories both to the children and Hester Rumpel. He found in himself a gift for a mild sort of fun-making; he found he could say things that would make them laugh. And as often as he could, he would help Sarah. That was difficult, for her own strength was a very matter-of-fact thing, while few people realized the layers of broad peasant muscle in Tom Paine’s sloping shoulders. But in carrying buckets of water or sacks of feed, he was permitted to have his own way now and again, and it gave him a strange pleasure when his strength dragged from her a grudging smile of admiration.

She spoke little, as if taking it for granted that he knew how much she could convey with a smile and a word, or simply with a movement of her fair head. When Paine confided to her the work he was doing, he half doubted whether she understood more than a part of it.

“I’m writing a small book to make things clear,” he said once.

“You mean the Boston men?”

“That and yourself.”

She smiled and nodded and didn’t ask him what he meant by that.

“It’s like having lived for one thing,” he tried to explain. “This book is the one thing. I want it to sweep everything out of the way, so men and women can start fresh.”

“Father will enjoy reading it,” she said.

There were never any words of love, he never kissed her. If he stayed of an evening after the children were put to bed, they might walk down the lane while Jacob smoked his pipe on the porch. There was a moon, waxing and waning through the nights; there were the birds courting in the darkness and competing with the crickets; there was the far-off barking of dogs. Yet it was no surprise to him when she said, on one of those evenings, “Will you be asking for my hand, Tom?” And then added, as if he had asked a question, “Mother says there’s a mighty difference of age, but I don’t hold with that. I’ve a great favor for you, Tom, and I think I love you with all my heart.”

She was simple, he decided, simple and no more, but the rush of pain in his heart, searing, hopeless pain told him that never in his life had he wanted anything more than this fair-haired girl. Whether he loved her or not was suddenly unimportant; she was his first and last good hope; she was all that makes a man human, and after this he would not be human; after this he would walk silently and alone.

They went on a while further and then sat down on a stone fence, and he told her, “I was married twice before.”

She looked at him without reproach, and he told her who his first wife was and how she had died.

“That was a sorrowful thing,” she said, still without reproach, but he knew it was over and done with, that Sarah was alive again, freed from this strange, hook-nosed wanderer. He should have gone then, but he wanted to tell her; he wanted to justify himself where no justification was needed. He tried to make her understand how a man might be broken and go to shelter as an animal goes to ground; but in her way of life and thinking there was a dignity that could not be broken but only destroyed. The story came out haltingly; it was nine years after his first wife had died, and he was at the bottom; but what did she know of the bottom with her health and her bountiful vitality? He tried to tell her of the things he had done in those nine years, of the hell that was London for the poor, of his pent-up savage desire to be free, of the trades he had followed, the degradation, the misery, the brief surges of hope when he preached in the meadows with the Methodists—“Cast off sin and come ye into the arms of the Lord”—and then the hope gone, the bottom rungs of the ladder, and then finally the very bottom, the deepest bottom, the complete hopelessness where there was nothing but death.

“And then this man took me in,” he said. “He was a good man. He kept a little tobacco shop and he had almost nothing at all, but he took me in. Like Christ, he knew not the evil from the good, but only the weak from the strong. God help me, I was weak, I was dying.”

“But what was his life worth?” she might have thought from that brief picture of inferno.

“I had a debt to him?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Then he died. He had a wife and daughter. I wanted to care for them, I stayed with them. And then there was talk, and for the mother’s sake I married the girl whom I didn’t love—”

She could see that.

He tried to tell how the business had broken up, it was such a poor little trade, the way his wife began to hate, how he tried to help others, to work some good. His words were no use any more. He couldn’t tell how his wife despised him, how she left him, his dread of the debtors’ prison, how he fled. He didn’t want to make himself out to be anything, but the more he tore off in abasement, the less Sarah comprehended. This half-world, this dreadful twilight land of hopelessness, was as far away and as unreal to her as the sandy wastes of Egypt. For her, human beings were compounded flesh and blood, not pain and terror and wretchedness.

When he said goodnight, he knew he would never come back, and as he walked away she looked after him, neither happy nor sorrowful, but thinking of how he wanted to write a small book to make things clear.

Things were quieter in Philadelphia. Members of the Second Continental Congress, after they had said all they possibly could say and accomplished practically nothing at all, remembered their farms and estates, their mills, shops, and distilleries, and by ones and twos they trickled away from Philadelphia. The new commander in chief, General George Washington of Virginia, started his leisurely ride northward to Boston to take command of the several thousand Yankees who now sprawled around that city in a sort of siege. The bloody battle which afterwards came to be known as Bunker Hill but was then called Breed’s Hill, was still fresh enough in the minds of the British to make them move very cautiously, and as things were now both sides waited for the other to make the next move.

In Philadelphia, a hot, slow summer set in. Prudent shopkeepers, feeling that this was another storm blown on its way, took down the shutters from their shop windows; and as a whole, the citizens of the town were quite satisfied things had not come to a head.

Meanwhile, Paine stayed close to the city, lived with it, and felt its pulse. He never went back to the Rumpels after that last evening there, yet he took a certain grim pride in the fact that the incident had not set him back on his heels. Slowly and painfully, out of all the broken, dirty pieces of his life, he was building a plan, a course, and a method. Now he was content to walk alone; he quite knew what he wanted to do, and he felt an ominous certainty that as time passed it would become even more clear. In the life on the peaceful, prosperous farm he saw something good and peaceful and sweet, yet he was half grateful that it was denied to him.

He had a little room, a bed, a bolster, chest, coat-rack, and table, two fairly good suits of clothes, ink and paper. That was enough, a man should want no more. He needed a few pennies for candles, something for food, something for drink. During this time he no longer allowed himself to be drunk, yet he saw no reason to do without liquor. Rum helped him; caring little for himself or for what became of him, he was ready to use anything that might make his pen move more easily on the paper. He was writing stuff out of thought and making something out of nothing, and after he had worked steadily for five, six, or seven hours, the little room closed in on him. Rum helped; as he drank, his movements would become slow and painful, but the quill would continue to scratch, which was all that mattered. He had no delusions; what he wrote might never be read by more than a dozen persons, but it was all he could do and what he had to do. Men don’t make new worlds in an afternoon; brick has to be placed on brick, and the process is long and incredibly painful.

Without realizing it, he neglected his appearance, sometimes spending twenty-four hours in his room, shaving less often, hoarding his small store of money, allowing his stockings to wear out and his clothes to become shabby. Those citizens of Philadelphia who noticed the change remarked that Aitken was wise to fire him. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” they said. His money low, Paine spent a night writing a poem and took it to Aitken, who gave him a pound, certainly more than it was worth. But somewhere in his flint-like, Scotch shell, Aitken nursed a fondness for this plodding, almost bullish man, who childishly believed that the world wanted to hear his solution to its woes.

“How goes the masterpiece?” Aitken asked him.

“It’s no masterpiece. It’s an attempt at common sense, of which I have little enough, God knows.”

“I will no’ print it, so don’t come asking me.”

Paine grinned.

“Will ye have supper?”

“I will at that,” Paine nodded. He hadn’t eaten a good cooked meal in God knows how long, and he felt a sudden longing to be with people he knew. At Aitken’s table was Joshua Craige, a linen merchant recently come over from England, full of news of how London was taking the revolt. “There’s more for the colonies than against them,” Craige said. “You would think the revolt is coming there, not here.”

“And perhaps it is,” Paine said thoughtfully.

“And how do you make that out, mister?”

Paine shrugged and avoided the question. Only vaguely defined in his mind was a picture of the whole world renewing itself, dreams of a brotherhood so vast, so complete that the half-drawn conception was overpowering and beyond words.

Jefferson would not call attention to Paine’s poverty, his failings in matters of dress; Jefferson was in the process of adoring the common man, and being only thirty-two he was still young enough to attach reality to his conception. Himself the immaculate aristocrat, it astonished him—though it shouldn’t have—to find that Paine arrived at much the same conclusions out of experience that he, Jefferson, had gathered out of philosophy and reading. But whereas Jefferson had dreamed enough democracy to make it real, he could never quite grasp the concept of revolution. For Paine it was the other way around, and his thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson’s ever could be. Listening to Paine read something of what he had written, Jefferson wondered whether Paine knew what devils he was loosing upon the quiet eighteenth-century world wherein they lived.

Paine read hoarsely and self-consciously, ashamed before Jefferson:

“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province or a Kingdom; but of a continent—at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.…”

There was no style; it came forth as raucously as the preaching of a Methodist minister, and it struck with frantic hammer blows. A man could memorize words like those and drive his plow or hammer to the rhythm—

“O! Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Jefferson didn’t smile; a working man who cribbed from the Bible all he knew of style, who in the terms of a backwoods preacher roared a new creed for mankind, nevertheless said something no one else dared to say outright.

“What are you going to call it?” Jefferson asked.

“I think, common sense. That’s all it is.”

Word of Paine’s project got around, and people would say, “That’s common sense.” They would say, “He is preaching dissolution and hatred and revolt. Separation from the mother country.” Or, “Another common sense,” when someone spoke a word for the independence of the thirteen colonies.

A little book to show men what to think.

“Of course, separation in time,” old Ben Franklin said to him one day. “But be careful, Paine, be careful.”

He carried the manuscript around with him, crumpled, ink-stained paper, and sitting in a tavern with a mug of rum, he would write, correct, write again, smudge and blot and scrape together the future of America.

“Is it still common sense?” he’d be asked.

He wove the Bible into what he was writing. To the devil with the sophisticates of the city, he told himself. The man with the plow is the man with the gun, and the man with the plow reads and believes only one book. So he took from the Bible whatever he could whenever he could, and wove it into the rest. One night in a coffee house, having had a little too much, he read aloud. Of course, it was common sense, and he could draw a crowd, and it was very well put that the devil can quote scripture.

“To hell with all of you and all of you be damned!” he roared at the well-dressed, well-paunched Philadelphia merchants. And then, going home that night, he was set upon by half a dozen young toughs, his manuscript torn to shreds, himself rolled in the mud and beaten, his pants removed and a lash laid twenty or thirty times over his behind.

He kept his lips tight about it, and when Aitken came to him and said he might have a hint as to who the assailants were, Paine simply shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter. The few pages they tore up I know by heart.”

“But you, man, you!”

“I’ll live,” Paine said briefly.

The Reverend Jared Heath of the Society of Friends put it to Paine in a different fashion.

Heath, a small, moist-eyed man, said to Paine with utter sincerity, “Thomas, thee know not what thee do.”

“And exactly what am I doing that I don’t know?” Paine demanded.

“Thee are setting brother against brother and father against son and workman against employer with this writing of independence. Who, Thomas, speaks for independence? Thee should know that not the good people, not the considerate, not the gentle, but the discontented, those who make mock of God, the foreigners among us. Thee are one of us, yet thee write to plunge us into bloodshed.”

“I am one of many things,” Paine said wearily, not wanting to hurt this little man who evoked memories of his father, his uncles, of the old meeting house at Thetford.

“Come to us and pray and thee will see light.”

The summer past, the leaves turning red and brown and yellow as they rustled over the cobbled streets of Philadelphia, the cold clean winds blowing from the northwest, Paine still scraped at his paper. The thing was done or never done; he didn’t know. He had written a little book to make men see the thing clearly, and it asked for independence. With deliberate hatred, he had torn apart the whole conception of monarchy. He had pointed out how long man had been nailed to the cross, and in words a farmer could understand begged for a good new world in this good new land. He had even tried his hand at a form of government. But always he harped on a single fact, that regardless of the pain, the torment, and the bloodshed, here must be a new and independent country.

He wrote on the first page, as if purging himself, “Common Sense, written by an Englishman.”

And then it was done, a heap of scribbled-over paper. No one would read it and probably no one would print it, but it was for the doing that Paine worked.

He was tired and listless, not left even with a desire to be drunk. Fascinated by the cool change of season, he wandered lazily through the narrow streets of Old Philadelphia, sniffing the winds that blew from the wide and grave and mysterious west. Never in England came such a change of season, sharp and clean, the air washing over a whole continent to thunder at the tidewater wanderers fled from the old world.

He discovered, so short was the memory of men, even for a ribald jest, that few now remembered he was Common Sense, and fewer poked fun at him. He was left alone, and often he said to himself that was just as well.

He let Aitken read his finished manuscript; no animosity was left between them, and Aitken, glasses perched on his nose, followed the scrawl carefully and considerately. Finally he said, “It’s no’ a bad thing, Thomas, but, my lad, it’s muckle dangerous.”

“If anyone reads it,” Paine said.

“I will no’ publish it, but why na’ take it to Bobby Bell, who’s a fool for such matters.”

“If you think so,” Paine nodded.

Bell was a Scotsman too, hatchet-faced, with ink-grimed hands. He said a good morning to Paine, and then took the manuscript, leaned against his counter and began to read. Paine dropped to a chair, closed his eyes, dozed a little, opened his eyes to see that the Scotsman had started over at the front page. His face never moved, never changed expression as he went through the manuscript again. Then he folded it carefully, laid it down on the counter, and placed a paperweight on it to hold it in place.

“You don’t want it,” Paine said.

“No-o—”

Paine began to rise but the Scotsman said, “Be in no hurry. I canna guarantee a profit, but I will set type and make a book of it. A man canna say will sell or will no’ sell, but I lean to standing up to what’s mine. They’re good, clear sentiments.”

“I don’t want any money,” Paine said. “I wrote this because I had to, that’s all. If you make money, you can have it; I don’t want it.”

“I have no argument with a man who desires to throw a penny in my lap.”

“Then you’ll print it.”

“That I will,” Bell said somberly.

And then Paine rose and left the shop as casually as he had entered.