7

COMMON SENSE

DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, a young Philadelphia physician who had some time since decided that more than physical ills ailed mankind, told Ben Franklin how Bell had cooled toward the idea of Paine’s book. “I think he was afraid,” Rush said. “I don’t blame him. Like a hundred thousand others, he doesn’t know on what side his bread is buttered; he has other things to think about, all men have, I suppose.

“But, God, the more I think of it, the more I wonder how those farmers at Lexington had the guts to stand up to it.”

“Did you read the book?” Franklin asked.

“Yes.”

“And did you like it?”

“It’s not something a man likes or dislikes. Neither is gunpowder, nor bleeding.”

“Of course, you got Bell to go ahead?” Franklin said quietly.

“Was that wrong? He owes me, and I suppose I put my finger on him where it hurt a little.”

“Things are not right and wrong any more,” Franklin reflected, almost sadly. “We go ahead, and that’s all.”

“Of course, they’re right and wrong!”

“Of course,” Franklin shrugged. “It was right for kings to rule the world for a thousand years. It was right for little people to suffer and die. It was so right for men to be slaves that there was never a need for chains.” He added, after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m sorry I am an old man. I would like to see—”

“If you want to read the book,” Rush said, “it will be off the presses in a few days. You’ve probably seen parts of it in manuscript. That man Paine certainly isn’t reticent.”

“Bring me a copy,” Franklin nodded, reflecting that he had had a hand in opening Pandora’s box, almost boyishly eager to see what Paine, who would shake the world apart, had to say.

From the press and just sewn together, it still smelled of ink and smudged as Paine held it in his hands, a thin book called “Common Sense, written by an Englishman,” with big block letters on the cover, sticky as Paine opened it.

“Done,” Bell said.

Paine told him, “I don’t want you to suffer for this,” and Bell shrugged. “I’ll want to buy a few copies,” said Paine.

Bell nodded.

“To show them to my friends.”

“Ye may.”

“You’ll give it to me a little cheaper than the regular price?” Paine remarked, not able to keep a note of anxiety out of his voice, his hand in his pocket holding all the money he had in the world.

“I may.”

“It makes a pretty book,” said Paine.

Consigned to Baltimore by stage, the package had neither the sender’s name nor the contents marked on it, only the destination, the shop of Marcus Leed, a small bookseller. But Bell, to purchase the driver’s silence, had given him a dozen copies to sell himself at two shillings to whoever would buy. In the coach, the passengers took one to share among them and while away the hours with—fat, bespectacled Parson Amos Culwoodie, Methodist free preacher, reading sonorously:

“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy.”—The parson had always felt as much.—“It first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required—” Jacob Stutz, the miller, sitting alongside the parson, knew that if man doesn’t live by bread alone, bread at least is as necessary as anything else, and now wondered what king on earth could do a simple grading of flour.

A long journey and a noisy one. The parson reaffirmed his position as God’s right hand man when he read, “How came the king by a power the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check?”

“How indeed?” Mrs. Roderick Clewes asked.

The parson took off his hat in deference to a lady. “There is no divine right in man,” he stated decisively.

“None?”

“None, I tell you, madam. For a minister, a call perhaps, an inspiration, an unfolding of the darkness, a nearness to God. But divine right—that, madam, I assure you, is dispensed by Satan.”

In the old Brackmeyer Coffee House by Dr. Rush’s arrangement were met David Rittenhouse, James Cannon, Christopher Marshall, Ludwig Rees, and Amberton St. Allen, a strange company of the high and the low, united by a desperate feeling that now there was no turning back. It gave them a feeling of romance, a feeling of living high and swiftly and gloriously, to know that when the redcoats came to Philadelphia they would be among the first hanged. Withal, theirs was an intellectual approach, and their god was Ben Franklin, not the Adams cousins. When Rush told them he had called them together to read a pamphlet, they nodded, called for drinks, and set themselves to listen.

“Never mind who wrote this,” Rush said, and then he read slowly and meticulously for almost three hours, stopping now and then to answer a brief question, but toward the latter part of his reading holding his listeners in a rapt silence.

“It’s called Common Sense,” he said when he had finished.

“Of course, it’s Paine’s thing,” Rittenhouse nodded.

“That’s right.”

“If this be treason—” someone paraphrased.

“You don’t realize—it’s so damned insidious.”

“How much?”

“Two shillings.”

“Well, it ought to be less.”

“You think people will buy it?”

“Is there anyone who won’t? The man’s a devil and a genius.”

“No, he’s a peasant. Have you ever seen his hands, like slabs of beef. He’s a peasant, and that’s why he understands us, because we’re a nation of peasants and shopkeepers and mechanics. He comes here a year ago and he knows what’s in our guts. He’s not writing for you and me, but for the man at the plow and the bench, and, God, how he flatters them, crawls inside of them, tickles them, seduces them, talks their own language, says to them: Isn’t this reasonable? Isn’t this common sense? Why haven’t you done this long ago? Bathe the world in the blood of tyrants! You and I and all the rest, why are we slaves when we can be free? Is he Christ or the devil? I don’t know. I know, after hearing that thing read, there will be no peace for a long time.”

“For how long?”

“Not ten years—maybe a hundred, two hundred. Maybe never—I don’t know if men were made to be slaves or free.”

Abraham Marah was a trader with the Indians, a lonely man, a strong man but black-eyed and black-visaged. His name when he came to the country as a little boy had been Abraham ben Asher, but they called him Marah because he was bitter, and as he came of age and lived more and more in the dark forests he called himself Abraham Marah, after the new fashion. He was a Jew, but at the synagogue he was known as a rebel. “I’m a free man,” he would say, “and God has done nothing for me.”

But he wasn’t slow with money when they asked for contributions. As they said, What use had he for money? With no home, no wife, no possessions but the pack on his back and his long Pennsylvania squirrel gun, he would roam on for months at a time. He knew the Indians—the Shawnee, the Miami, the Wyandot, and the Huron—and they knew him. Fur hunters they all were, and he could come back from six months in the dark forest with a fortune in pelts on his donkeys. Now, starting out again, he came to Bell and bought twenty copies of Paine’s book.

“Why, Abraham?” Bell asked him.

“Because I read it, because where I go, others think twice, and then in the end stay home.”

He brought the first copy to Fort Pitt. John Neville and his Virginia militia had already taken the post, and now they were sitting around, drinking more than was good for them, wondering whether to go home, wondering why they had taken up guns when there was neither purpose nor reason nor goal. They were long, hard men in dirty hunting shirts, and many of them had not deciphered a written word these ten years past. But, as Lieutenant Cap Heady said, when a Jew gives away something, there’s a reason. Heady read out loud in the light of a campfire:

“In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which, in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshiped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

It was the sort of thing the Virginians enjoyed hearing. “Go on,” they told Heady.

Marah’s way was long and rambling. A copy stayed in a Kentucky stockade, another in an Ohio stockade, one in a lake cabin with the promise to pass it on and on. Three copies were saved for the French Canadians, the voyageurs whom Marah loved better than all other Americans, and one copy was unfolded, page by page, in an Iroquois longhouse as Marah painfully translated Common Sense into the Indian tongue.

General George Washington of Virginia was a troubled man; come up from his Mount Vernon, from his beloved Virginia, his broad and stately Potomac, from all the good, earthy things of his life, the lush fields, the fruit trees, the many bottles of good wine, he was now bogged down outside of Boston, in command of several thousand sprawling, lazy, totally undisciplined New England Yankees. The war, for all apparent purposes, had come to a halt; but the doubts of intelligent men, who had little idea of what it all meant or where it was taking them, went on. For Washington, who had come into this without any clear idea of means or end, but simply with a fierce love of the land he tilled, a decent respect for the dignity of himself and his friends, and a hatred of the English method of conducting the tobacco business, doubt mounted steadily and surely. The word “independence” was too frequently spoken; it had a quality of terror, burn, pillage, and kill—remake the world! Washington loved the world he lived in; the earth was good, and better were the fruits of the earth. But to remake this good-enough world into some uncertain horror of the future—

It was in such a mood that he sat down and read a book brought from Philadelphia by express messenger. It was called Common Sense. Jefferson wrote him, “… you will want to know that this is Paine’s work; you remember him, I think. He has sound ideas for building a strong and united nation, and considers that already we are a people at war for our freedom.…”

They were a strange people in Vermont. “A mortal, sinful people,” a pastor from Virginia said. “A presumptuous people. They build their fence posts of carved stone, as to say a man’s days on earth are not numbered.” A silent people too, and a cold people who covered their bridges and never spent a penny until after they had earned it. The saying went that Maine men were hard, but Vermont men harder, Maine men mean, but Vermont men meaner. People not so delicate in their speech said, Court a Vermont lass with gloves.

They liked figures, they liked to know that two and two made four, and they had little patience for ideals. Independence was all very well for Vermont, but they were not going to be hasty and pick up their guns for foreigners in New York and New Jersey. And in the green hills it was bruited about that the middle countries were more or less Dutch provinces where a man could walk for weeks and never hear a word of English spoken.

They took Common Sense at arm’s length. A few weeks after publication Hiram Jackson, the leather dealer, brought a dozen copies over the New Hampshire border into Vermont and handed them out to the farmers who sold him hides.

“Boston stuff,” he said, which was his term for anything even mildly incendiary.

They were read carefully; where Paine pointed out that less than a third of the inhabitants of Pennsylvania were of English descent, they felt confirmed in something they had always suspected; when Paine said that it would be good business sense to break from the Empire, they read on. A copy came into the hands of Jeremiah Cornish, the Bennington printer. He approved of it after three days’ discussion with his neighbors, and considering that Pennsylvania was a good distance off, certainly too far for an apology or a royalty payment, set it up himself. The first run was a thousand copies that went like fire for a shilling-fourpence, and Jeremiah seeing a small but respectable profit in the offing, did another run of five hundred which he sent across into New Hampshire. Ichabod Lewes, a New Hampshire printer, knew enough of Vermont people to suspect Cornish had wildcatted the edition, and accordingly set it himself, ran three thousand, of which he sent twelve hundred to Maine. The Maine men were frugal, but they liked the pamphlet; it made sense; somehow, it echoed what they had been thinking, just as it curiously echoed what men had been thinking in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and other colonies down into the Deep South. It was the kind of thing that was good for an evening of raging debate; it was the kind of thing a man could chew on while he did his work.

They didn’t reprint in Maine, but passed the things from hand to hand until they were falling to pieces.

Allen Johnson had a farm seven miles outside of Trenton, a wife and three children, and eleven Bibles. He didn’t need eleven; in fact, four or five of them had never been opened, and now and then in a moment of heresy he would say to himself, “What on God’s earth does a man want with more than one Bible?” But the Bible man came through every November, regular as the frost, his cart bulging with Scriptures and almanacs.

Johnson didn’t have the almanac habit, but it was a mortal sin to refuse a Bible offered for sale, like denying the word of God, and that being the case the row of Bibles became longer by one each year. Nor did Johnson blame the Bible man, who called himself Pastor Ames; one man’s living was another man’s backache, and that was the way things were. This year, Pastor Ames was almost a month late, and when he did show up, the almanacs were missing from his cart; instead he had about a hundred and fifty copies of a little book called Common Sense.

“Come with the word of God,” he said to Johnson.

Doing his best not to hear, Johnson made a point of inspecting the stock. “No almanacs?” he questioned, as if this year he had just come around to buying one.

“Politics,” the pastor said. “Lord bless us, it’s a mighty year for politics.”

Johnson picked up a copy of Common Sense and turned over the pages.

“Two shillings,” Pastor Ames said.

The Bibles were four.

“I’ll take one,” Johnson said.

It was only afterwards that Johnson recalled that a purchase of the Bible relieved him from the arduous duty of reading it, a task that was taken from his shoulders every Sunday morning at church. On this little book, he had an investment of two shillings, and determined not to throw his money away, he sat down that same evening to read it. When his wife asked him what on earth he was reading, he said:

“For the Lord’s sake, Mandy, leave a body alone!” He knit his brows and read on, and slowly what was a task turned into a most amazing discovery.

The printer, Bell, was astonished, almost frightened; this had never happened to him before; indeed it had never happened to anyone in the country of Pennsylvania before. After he had set type on Paine’s book, he had started the printing with a moderate run in the hundreds, and that was as it should be according to all his experience. Almanacs, which were in great favor with the country folk, sold well, and sometimes, as was the case with Franklin’s almanacs, in the tens of thousands; but in the country political pamphlets had never been in great favor, and even in town, unless they were throwaways, they had only a limited demand. Even with popular English novels, a run of fifteen hundred was considered most successful, while two thousand was distinctly out of the ordinary. Paine’s book was overpriced; he had known that; two shillings put it out of the class of apprentices, most workmen and small farmers; but Bell had laid on the heavy price to protect himself in what he was quite certain would be a complete publishing failure. Paine had friends in Philadelphia, and what with the friends, the curious, and the opposition, Bell had felt confident of a sale of at least five hundred copies.

He had already, a week after publication, sold more than two thousand.

He ran a full thousand for New York, then another thousand; he took on a journeyman printer and two apprentices. They labored all one night getting out an edition of three thousand in demand here in Philadelphia. Franklin Grey, a local bookseller, asked for a thousand at a shilling-twopence, wholesale, and Bell agreed to supply him. Then, by post from Charleston, came an order for two thousand. Hartford wanted seven hundred; the little village of Concord in Massachusetts a hundred; a place he had never heard of, Brackton, fifty.

Angus MacGrae, a roving book jobber whose wide territory included Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina, and who sold as many books straight from his lumbering, canvas-covered wagon as he did to various small shopkeepers, was a regular customer of Bell’s, as he was of the many other Philadelphia printers, publishers, and book dealers. He had picked up a copy of Common Sense in Maryland, and for the hundred lazy miles between Baltimore and Philadelphia, he had let the reins hang and had read it and reread it as his two old drays ambled along. If ever a man knew the pulse, the fever, the beating tempo of America, that man was MacGrae; he loved the written word only less than the spoken one, and if he had not given a good deal more effort to talking about books than selling them, he might have been a very rich man.

When he left a copy of Defoe in a backwoods log cabin, he glowed with pride, and it was he who talked several hundred good Presbyterians into believing that lush hours spent with Fielding would not destroy their immortal souls. He had sold Swift and Pope to buckskin-clad hill men as well as cultured plantation owners, and he had arranged for his own translation of Candide. His love for America was compounded of its literacy; European-born, he never ceased to wonder at this strange, hard-muscled motley conglomeration of people who had so tender and shy a love for the written word.

When he finished Paine’s book, parts of it read over three and four times and committed to memory, he made up his mind to meet the writer, and when he did, said quietly,

“Mon, mon, but it is glorious.”

Paine, still tired, still unable to comprehend what was happening with the small thing he had written, was able to say nothing, only nod foolishly.

“It must be read widely,” MacGrae stated.

“I hope so.”

“Be no’ afraid of that. I have made other writers, such as the Frenchman Voltaire and the Englishman Swift, a reputation a mon need no’ be ashamed of.”

To Bell, MacGrae said, “I want five thousand copies.”

“And are you entirely out of your head?”

“Almighty sane. I pay one shilling, and I will no’ bargain with ye, Bell.”

“I canna do it. I have no’ the presses nor the paper nor the labor.”

“Mon, I give ye two hundred pounds—what are ye afraid of?”

And Bell, all this beyond his understanding, sighed ana agreed.

When old Ben Franklin came to Bell’s shop for fifty copies to add to the fifty Franklin had already mailed here and there, Bell tried incoherently to explain what had happened. The Scotsman looked haggard, red-eyed from lack of sleep, grimed all over with printer’s ink.

“It’s no miracle,” Franklin said. “A book sells because people want to read it, or because it answers things they’ve been asking.”

Bell showed Franklin two wildcat editions, one from New England and another from Rhode Island.

“I wouldn’t be angry at that,” Franklin said.

“And I am not. I am a small man, and night and day my presses are not idle. God knows how many I’ve printed, not I. Over a hundred thousand, sir, I assure you. I weep for paper, I sob for ink, and I have moved out my family to make room for the apprentices. I dream nightmares, and it’s Common Sense.”

“Others will dream nightmares,” Franklin smiled.

Outside of Boston, the sprawling, bickering, discontented Yankee army that had been besieging the British for so long now, fell avidly on Common Sense. The long, dreary hours in winter quarters had set them to wondering why they were fighting. In a fashion, Paine’s book told them; they dreamed out the new world. At first, it was a copy read monotonously to a brigade, then argument, then a few more copies to set a man in his reasoning, then a hundred, then a thousand copies, then a dog-eared, dirty copy of Common Sense in every haversack, good to wipe a razor on, good to start fires with, good for a man’s soul and his body, good to copy into apologetic letters sent home:

“My dear and Affectionate kept wife,

“Always in my memory, I think of you night and day, but do not entirely berate me for selfishness, as things are to be done and there is not a way to live Quietly and Happily without doing them. A man who is an Englishman not an American writes Sundry and Sound reasons in a book called as COMMON SENSE. He says and I agree with him, 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. I agree with him and you will when you read the Book I send you. Have Jamie stay with Jenny night and Day when she comes to Calf.…”

Out of a prisoner’s rucksack, a copy came into the hands of Colonel Bently, who read it and brought it to General Howe of His Majesty’s Army. Howe read it, too, and decided:

“My word, but the beggar’s devilishly clever.” He told Bently, “I want a point made of taking this Common Sense. I want him hanged, do you understand?”