8

THE TIMES THAT TRIED MEN’S SOULS

IN ONE way you are a fool,” Franklin told him. “Not a brave man, but a fool.”

“How is that, sir?”

“Have you ever shot a musket?”

“No.”

“Or loaded one?”

“No.”

“And wouldn’t any farmer boy from the backwoods make a better soldier than you?”

“I suppose so,” Paine admitted.

“What do you believe in? Did this war come out of the mouth of a gun or the mind of a man?”

“That’s done,” Paine said. “I wrote a little book because I wanted men to see what they were shooting at. I didn’t know what would happen. Now would you want me to stay here and let others die for what I said?”

“So you could keep saying it,” Franklin pointed out.

“No—”

Franklin shrugged.

“I’m happy,” Paine said. “I’ve never been happy before. I suppose I could have a better musket, but suddenly they’ve become so scarce that I ought to be satisfied with what I’ve got. I know what I’m made for; I am not a fool nor a martyr, but just a man who has discovered what work he can do.”

“When will you be leaving?” Franklin asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Good luck then,” Franklin said.

“Thank you, sir—”

“And don’t try to die. Don’t doubt your own courage. Remember that this is only the beginning.”

He was no longer Tom Paine; suddenly and curiously, he had become Common Sense. He had written a little book, a hope or a suggestion; he was a stranger in a tidewater colony that had defied the world. He was nobody, yet out of that he became everybody, for he had seen, with the candid eyes of a peasant, the hope of mankind.

Yet they never knew what to do. The farmers stood at Concord and Lexington. The militia roved through the forest to the backwoods posts and ripped them from their small British garrisons. New York and Philadelphia belonged to the radicals, although they had been driven, cursing, fighting, bleeding from Boston. It was much as if a wave of sudden, furious fire had burned through America, brightly at first, then with less intensity, then just a simmer of revolt that promised to die.

Now he was Common Sense.

One night, walking alone in the cool evening, trying one street of Philadelphia and then another, wanting nothing at the moment, not the warmth and companionship of a coffee house, not the hot sustenance of drink, not a woman or a man, but only himself in a proper perspective, Tom Paine turned over in his mind what he had done.

Not abruptly can a small man reach for the stars. Christ was a carpenter, and he, Paine, was only a staymaker, an exciseman, a cobbler, a weaver. “Paine, Paine, be humble,” he told himself, and in his thoughts going back to the speech of his childhood:

“Thee are nothing, dirt thee are, dirt, dirt, and both cheeks have been slapped. Thee have been humbled, thee face in the filth—” And he found himself laughing and praying, “God, O my God, how thou hast exalted me.” Love inside of him was without measure, and his strength too without measure. Again and again, he clenched and unclenched his hands. Men were brothers. “Oh, my brothers, my brothers,” he whispered.

He said, “No, I’m not going mad—”

Benjamin Rush had pointed out to him, “Revolution, Paine, is a technique which we must learn with no history. We are the first, and that’s why we blunder so. We have no precedent, but only a theory, and that theory is that strength lies in the hands of the armed masses. I am not speaking of ideals, of right and wrong, of good and bad, not even of a morality, for in the last analysis all those things are catchwords and the only implement is strength.”

Paine nodded. Slowly and painfully, he had been coming around to the same point of view. “The strength was always with the people,” he said.

“Of course—firearms don’t change that. But there was never, in this world, a technique for revolution. There was a technique for tyranny and strength implemented it, but always the strength of a few. The strength of many is revolution, but curiously enough mankind has gone through several thousand years of slavery without realizing that fact. The little men have pleaded, but when before have they stood up with arms in their hands and said, This is mine!”

“There were never the circumstances before.”

“Perhaps. It’s true that we have here a nation of armed men who know how to use their arms; we have a Protestant tradition of discussion as opposed to autocracy; we have some notion of the dignity of man; and above all we have land, land enough for everyone. Those are fortunate circumstances, but now we must learn technique. The man with the iron glove has held this world for God knows how many thousands of years, and in how short a time do you suppose we can take it back from him—not to mention holding it?”

“I don’t like to think about that.”

“You must. We are learning a bloody, dreadful business, this technique of revolution, but we must learn it well. You wrote a little book, and because of that men will know why they fight. You wanted independence, and we’re going to have it, mark my word. Six months ago you were rolled in the dirt because people knew what you were writing; two weeks ago a man in New York was almost tarred and feathered because he planned to publish an answer to Common Sense. That’s not morality; that’s strength, the same kind of strength the tyrants used, only a thousand times more powerful. Now we must learn how to use that strength, how to control it. We need leaders, a program, a purpose, but above all we need revolutionists.”

Paine nodded.

“What are you going to do?”

“Join Washington,” Paine said.

“I think you’re right. Keep your eyes open, and don’t be discouraged. We are a free people, but we are only a few generations away from the slaves. We will whimper and cry and groan, and we will want to give up. We are not an orderly people, Paine, and I don’t think we will make good soldiers. In a little while we may forget what we are fighting for and throw away our muskets. Remember that—always remember that.”

Fame sat uneasily on his shoulders, and suddenly Philadelphia was repugnant to him, a fat, satisfied town that talked eternally, criticized vehemently, and did almost nothing at all. On the streets and in the coffee houses, where Paine’s book was fast becoming another Bible, talk of independence was free and easy, but in the Assembly the eastern delegates still held out against it. The frontier delegates stalked the streets with black faces, but there was nothing they could do.

A banquet was given for Paine; he did not have the money for a new coat, for lace cuffs, and he would neither beg nor borrow. He came as he was, shabby, without even a wig, sitting glumly at the table, thinking, “I told Franklin I was going, I told Rush—why don’t I go?” But it didn’t matter so much; the armies were sitting idle. Of course, give a thing a chance and it will blow over. On the table, as a centerpiece, was a monster pasteboard replica of Common Sense.

“Oh, the glory that this stranger has given our cause!” said Thaddeus Green, the toastmaster. “Oh, words of his that are fire, live forever!” Green had come in his militia uniform, blue and yellow. “Will not freemen lay down their lives gladly?” he cried.

Paine was getting drunk. He drank thirty-two toasts, and lay with his head in his plate, his mouth drooling. Almost everyone else was drunk, snoring, telling dirty stories, pawing the waitresses, dirtying their fine and fanciful uniforms, their lace and silk, shouting suddenly:

“God damn King George!”

“Liberty forever.”

“Like this,” Paine muttered. “Here the glory of free men.”

Jefferson had asked him to come. He sat there in a corner of the room, feeling like a fool, his hands on his knees, while Jefferson explained how Washington had reacted toward reading the book.

“You’ve done a great thing for your country—” Jefferson said.

Paine could not help thinking how empty and stupid words were. What was his country? What was he to these suave, aristocratic, lace-draped intellectual democrats? Why did he always feel like a fool?

“Naturally, you said what we’ve all been thinking,” Jefferson went on. “What we’ve been saying too. Yet you have to say a thing so men will understand it and comprehend it, even a man like Washington, and he’s no fool, you understand. Your book says it—and to everyone. Now we’re committed to independence.”

“I was waiting,” Paine said. “I was never really certain.”

“And what will you do now that you are satisfied—and I trust you are?”

“Join the army.”

“Is that wise?”

Paine shrugged; to have his decision weighed so, back and forth, with the supercilious attitude that no man could serve this movement by taking a gun in his hand, but only by sitting here in Philadelphia and mouthing words, was breaking down both his nerve and his determination. Slowly, he was becoming aware that these great and important men of the colonies, even Jefferson, whose reason was a creed and a religion, looked upon him as a sort of performing animal, a peasant to represent the numberless peasants who would make up the army of rebellion, a clever rabble rouser to be used for their purposes.

When in the newspapers someone attacked the revolutionary movement, the conception of an independent America, and Paine answered hoarsely and vehemently, there was a chorus of polite handclapping.

“We’re in committee now,” Jefferson said, “Franklin, Adams, Sherman, Livingston—I am making the draft of the declaration, purely and simply for Independence. I want you to know that I am using Common Sense, that I am proud to.”

“But not proud enough to include me in committee,” Paine thought, yet with a sort of satisfaction that he was out of that, that he could use himself according to his own desires. And he said, “When do you expect to have a vote on it?”

“In July, perhaps.”

“And then it will be the United States of America?”

This time Jefferson smiled and shrugged. “We owe a great deal to you,” he nodded.

“Nothing.”

Handling the future with assurance, Jefferson said easily, “Remember, Paine, if out of this comes something real and concrete, a republican state, you will not find it ungrateful.”

Then it was done, and the bright new world was made, and in the teeming, excited city of Philadelphia there were few who doubted that the people would rise to support this grandiloquent, rhetorical, generalized declaration of independence. Glory is born in July, 1776, they told each other. They paraded, singing that fantastic bit of doggerel that had attached itself to the army of the revolution, Yankee Doodle went to London Town—and who knew but that they would all be there? Invade Canada? Why not? And why not England? And why not the world, to make this the new Christianity? Of course, when Jefferson’s first draft of the declaration had been submitted to the Continental Congress, Benjamin Harrison leaped up and roared, “There is but one word in this paper which I approve, and that is the word Congress.” But on the other hand, hadn’t Caesar Rodney ridden eighty miles in twelve hours, killing horses, just to be on the floor of the house on July fourth and sign the document?

Paine was honored; hurt and honored, when a few days before the presentation of the document Jefferson had come to him with a sudden tenderness and said:

“Let me read you this.”

“Read it if you want to,” Paine said.

“It’s at the end, the summing up, and you did it. My God, Thomas, we don’t know our debt to you. History is like bad housekeeping entered into an account book.”

“Why don’t you get on with it?” Paine thought.

“We, therefore,” Jefferson read, “the representatives of the United States of America—” He glanced up at the slope-shouldered, unkempt man who had given him that phrase. “How does it sound?”

“Read it!”

“—in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these united colonies are, and of good right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the states of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.…”

“Well, it’s done,” Paine said.

“Yes—”

Paine was thinking that now there was nothing left to keep him here, he could go away.

Roberdeau, general of Pennsylvania militia, was a portly man with a face as red as a beet, a huge pair of haunches, and a glorious uniform of blue and yellow. A successful merchant, he was quite sure he would be an even more successful soldier, and once he had decided to lead a detachment to Amboy, south and west of Staten Island, he was satisfied that General Washington’s troubles were over. He offered Paine the post as his personal secretary. The Associators, as the militia called themselves, had drilled for a good many months now, and Roberdeau pointed out to Paine that to be with this brigade was something of a signal honor.

“I’ll come,” Paine said. “I don’t want any commission. If I can serve you as a secretary, well enough.”

“Such things as commissions can be arranged. I would, personally, prefer to see you as a major. More dignity in such a post than as a captain or a lieutenant. Aside from that, have you a uniform?”

Paine confessed that he hadn’t.

“Important, my boy, important. Only with uniformity can we inject into the ranks a certain military tradition, such as gleamed like a halo around the great Marlborough and Frederick of Prussia.”

“I’ll do without one,” Paine said, thinking of how those who had seen Washington’s army reported that there was not a uniform to a brigade.

“If it’s a matter of money …”

“It’s not a matter of money,” Paine said.

Bell had given him fifty copies of Common Sense; that, with his rusty old musket, powder, shot, a water bottle, and a bag of cornmeal, made up Paine’s luggage. He trudged with the rest, partly out of desire, partly because he could not afford a horse. Roberdeau, who took Paine’s abasement as a personal affront, did not talk to him for hours at a time; Paine hardly noticed that. Nothing else mattered but that now, after long last, he was marching shoulder to shoulder with his own kind, the shopkeepers, the clerks and mechanics, the weavers, carpenters, craftsmen. For the time, it was entirely emotional; they had met no enemy, seen nothing of war. And they knew nothing of it except what they had heard from New England. And in Massachusetts, hadn’t American losses been fantastically small?

The night of the first bivouac, Paine sat at the fire, heating his corn gruel, tensely aware of himself, unable to speak, tears of joy in his eyes. The voices of the militiamen were loud, somewhat self-conscious, bright. It was:

“Comrade, a light!”

“Share my gruel—porridge for bacon?”

“The devil with that, comrade, I have enough for both of us.”

“Citizen, how about a toast?”

There was a wagon full of rum in iron-bound casks. Roberdeau, patting his huge paunch, had one broken open. They toasted the Congress, Washington, Lee, Jefferson, who had written it all down so prettily, old Ben Franklin. A clear, youthful tenor began to sing:

“Oh, the pretty skies of Pennsylvania,

Oh, the meadows sylvan green,

Oh, the bluebird and the nightingale,

Oh, the countries, ’mong the countries,

Our sylvania is the Queen.”

Paine could hardly carry a tune, but he sang with the rest. The artillery men sat on their brace of cannon, swaying back and forth, keeping time with their ramrods. The fires trailed a curtain of sparks toward the sky, and a sweet, cool wind blew from the west. This was all Paine had ever thought of or dreamed of, the common men of the world marching together, shoulder to shoulder, guns in their hands, love in their hearts.

For Paine, it was an almost mystical fulfillment, and he said to himself, “Who can measure the forces started here? Men of good will march together and know their own strength. With the power we have, what can stop us, or even slow us? What can’t we achieve, what new worlds, what glories, what promises!”

But on the next day, their sublimity began to be more commonplace. A comrade is a comrade, but a blister on one’s heel is not to be sneezed at. The glorious cause of independence remained a cause glorious, but the muskets grew no lighter. Most of the firelocks they carried were brand-new, the product of Anson Schmidt, a Front Street gunsmith whose theories were violently opposed to those of the back-country craftsmen. In the Pennsylvania hinterland, a slim, light, long-barreled rifle had been developed. It threw a lead slug the size of a large green pea with amazing accuracy and outranged by at least a hundred yards any other weapon known at the time. But Schmidt reasoned, and rightly, what was the use of such a rifle to a man who was not a marksman? He developed his own gun, the Patriot Lady, he called it, wide of bore, bound with iron, and heavy as a small cannon. It could be loaded with anything, shot, nails, glass, wire, stones, and at thirty yards it was brutally, effective. Its great drawback was that it required a strong man to carry it.

The militia were not strong. For several hours they carried their muskets, and then someone got the idea of heaving his weapon into a supply wagon. Soon the supply wagons were groaning with the weight of a hundred muskets, and Roberdeau, blue with rage, screamed what kind of an army was this marching without arms?

“Well enough for you on your horse, fatty,” a private told the general.

“God damn you, you’ll have a hundred lashes for that!”

“And who’ll lay them on?”

Roberdeau backed down, but assured the man that he would write a charge to the Continental Congress. The men were tired, begrimed with sweat, surly; and it was too early in the campaign to look for trouble. Since Paine was the secretary, Roberdeau put it to him, instructing him to write the following to the military committee:

“Whereas one, Alexander Hartson, indulged in treasonable talk—”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Paine interrupted.

“No?”

“His talk wasn’t treasonable. It would be better to have him whipped.”

“I think I know how to order my brigade,” Roberdeau said. “Write what I tell you to; that’s why you’re here. I don’t need instructions in military ethics from any two-pence scrivener.”

“Very well,” Paine nodded.

There was a tall, loose-limbed man who took to walking alongside Paine. His name was Jacob Morrison, and he came from the wild and beautiful Wyoming Valley. His wife and child had died of smallpox, and he, sick of living alone in the dark woods, had come to Philadelphia, taken work as a hand in a flour mill, and there joined the Associators. Armed with a long rifle, clad in buckskin leggings and a hunting shirt, he almost alone in that motley group of militia appeared fitted for the business on which they were embarked. He took a liking to Paine, if for no other reason than that Paine continued to carry his own musket. He said to him once, in his slow, back-country drawl:

“Citizen, what do you think of our little war?”

“Things start slowly,” Paine said.

“Yes, but I reckon I seldom seen a seedier lot of fighting men.”

“Well, give them time—you don’t make soldiers over night. And you don’t make a new world in one day.”

“You’re English, aren’t you?” Morrison said. “What got you into this?”

Paine shrugged.

“For me, I don’t give a damn,” the backwoodsman drawled. “I got nothing to lose. But, Lord, there’s troubled times coming—”

That night Roberdeau took a new tack, changing from bullying to cajoling. He broke open an extra cask of rum, and announced to the men:

“We have with us here, citizens, a most illustrious patriot, the man who with words of fire wrote Common Sense. He has consented to say a few words to us concerning the cause for which we are determined to give our lives. Citizen Thomas Paine!”

Paine wasn’t prepared. He stood up sheepishly, stumbled into the light of a fire, and began to talk, very haltingly at first—“We are embarked on a deed of small men, and that’s what we are, small men, citizens, common people. We are going to find it hard, and grumble and complain, and some of us will go home. I think that’s how a revolution starts—”

Their permanent bivouac was at Amboy, close to where the Raritan River flows into lower New York Bay. Across the river were the hills of Staten Island, and beyond, on Manhattan, a terrible drama was being enacted. Washington’s orders were to hold New York with the rabble of militia he had under his command, twenty thousand in number, but none of them trained soldiers—New England Yankee farmers for the most part, some Pennsylvanians, some Jersey troops, a good many Virginians, and several brigades of Maryland troops, the latter the best of the lot. But to hold New York with that raggle-taggle mob was as absurd as it was impossible. Each day, more British transports and ships of the line sailed into the harbor, disgorging thousands and thousands of trained regulars and Hessians onto Staten Island. Meanwhile, Washington had split his army, placing half his men in Brooklyn to stave off a flank attack that might isolate him on the slim ridge of Manhattan. To counter this move, the British shifted part of their army to Long Island, and on the night of August 27, General Howe launched his attack. They found a weak spot in the American lines, captured a few sleeping sentries, flanked half of Washington’s army, and then, holding it in pincer jaws, proceeded methodically to destroy it.

Only through his own cool courage and the aid of a brigade of Marblehead fishermen was Washington able to evacuate what was left of his shattered army to New York. And there, almost before he had time to reorganize, the British attacked again, this time determined to destroy what was left of the colonial army.

They came near to accomplishing that purpose. Landing on Manhattan both from the East River and the Upper Bay, they again attempted to close the pincers, driving the routed, panic-stricken colonials before them. It became a wild footrace, in which an utterly demoralized mob of militia threw away their weapons and ran like rabbits for the fortified line which the Americans still held where One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is today. Whole brigades were cut off by the Hessians, ripped to pieces with cold steel, made prisoner; men cowered in barns, haylofts, thickets; others drowned themselves trying to swim across the Hudson and reach the Jersey shore. Only through a miracle did a good part of the troops which had held lower New York escape. In a few weeks the twenty thousand had been reduced to less than fifteen thousand.

And during this time, the Philadelphia Associators made themselves very small at Amboy. More than enough news of what was happening in New York filtered into their lines, and the only concrete result was desertion. It was a thing of the past to call one’s neighbor comrade, and as for citizen—

Paine had pleaded with General Roberdeau, with Colonel Plaxton, “What are we doing here? Over there in New York, the whole good hope of mankind is being smashed, and what are we doing here?”

“Our duty, which is to garrison Amboy.”

“Christ, no! We could march up through Jersey and cross over at Fort Lee and join Washington. Better yet, we could cross the Raritan and attack the British where they’re weakest, in Staten Island. Or we could raid over into Bayonne—”

Roberdeau smiled condescendingly. “You’re a writer, Paine, a dreamer, shall we say. The hard military facts—”

“God damn it, sir, what do you know about military facts?”

Plaxton blew up with rage, but Roberdeau only pouted and spread his arms helplessly. “First the others, now you, turning against me, talking treason.”

“Treason! My God, sir, is everything treason? Isn’t it treason to sit here on our behinds?”

“Orders—”

“From whom? Did the orders take into account that Washington’s army would be shattered, that we should lose New York? Has any man in your command fired a gun yet or faced an enemy?”

Fat, his face jelly-like in its impotence, Roberdeau blubbered his appeal to Plaxton, the slim, dandified gentleman, one of the Penn family, sneering and bored at the two of them:

“Is my duty my duty? Tell me? Am I to blame that Washington’s army is driven from New York? Am I to blame that instead of soldiers they give me shop clerks?”

Then there were the desertions; Philadelphia was not far enough away, and each night a few of the militia slipped out of camp. Almost no discipline was left, and for the most part the officers were drunk; if the general objected, they laughed in his face. Paine stormed, pleaded, exhorted; and strangely, the militia did not take offense at him; rather, they became like schoolboys being scolded. When he sat by a fire and read to them from Common Sense, they listened, fascinated, intrigued, and then for a moment he could fill them with passion:

“Do you understand, this is for us, for you and me, for our children! We are the beginning, and we are making a new world!”

But it didn’t take; they were homesick, frightened, bewildered by the reports from New York. If the British had cut to pieces Washington’s great army, which had already been under fire at Boston, what would happen with raw, untried militia?

“Listen to me, comrades!”

Now they hated the word. What did words mean when words led only to death. The revolution was a farce; and it was doubtless true that the British hanged all rebels—or gave them to the mercy of the Hessians.

As Jacob Morrison said, there should be at least twenty who could be counted on; he had been sounding them out, and he told Paine, “In this cursed Jersey, there must be at least a few hundred others we could pick up, enough to make a raiding party. I seen too many like Roberdeau, who is no good, and in a little while he’ll go home—mark my word.”

“I suppose he’ll go home,” Paine shrugged.

“Then what’s to hold us back? The Continental Congress?” asked Morrison derisively. Paine sat down and put his face in his hands; his head ached. He told Morrison:

“It’s mutiny, you know.”

Morrison asked him if he wanted to get drunk.

“All right.”

There was no longer a pretense made of guarding the rum. They had a quart each, and staggered around the camp, roaring obscene songs at the top of their lungs. Like a helpless schoolmarm, Roberdeau called them names until Morrison ran at him with a bayonet. Paine stood on a supply cart, swaying, exhorting the militia, who were not entirely sober themselves, moving them and himself to maudlin tears, watching out of the corner of his eyes how Morrison staggered around, brandishing the bayonet, finally falling off the cart.

But when it came down to facts, the next day, they could not find twenty in the camp who would join them, not ten and not even one. Roberdeau, Plaxton, and a few other militia officers held a council of war, the outcome of which was a decision to march back to Philadelphia; and when the Associators heard the decision read, they cheered for a full fifteen minutes. Paine and Morrison sat on a fallen tree trunk, their firelocks on their knees, and watched the camp break up. It didn’t take long, nor did Roberdeau speak to them; only when the Associators began to march did a few militiamen glance back and wave. Morrison began to hum softly, and Paine sighed and studied his rusty musket as if he had never seen it before.

“Not that I give a damn,” Morrison said, “and I suppose they have something to go back for. The little man, Tom, is a timid rabbit—don’t let it stick in your throat.”

“No—”

“Do you want a drink?”

Paine nodded, and silently Morrison passed him a leathern flask of rum. They rocked it back and forth for a little while, and then when it was empty, they threw it away. “Ye that love mankind,” Paine quoted, and Morrison said, “Shut up!”

“Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!”

“God damn you, shut up!”

“All right,” Paine nodded. “Only let’s get out of here—let’s get out of this damned place and not see it again.”

They crossed the Raritan and set out to walk to Fort Lee on the west bank of the Hudson River, some thirty miles to the north. There was a garrison and there was a place in Washington’s army for two men who held onto their guns. They took the old pike to Elizabethtown, trudging along through the cool September days, their guns over their shoulders, two left from all the Philadelphia militia, a tall backwoodsman and a slope-shouldered, broad-necked Englishman, profession: revolutionist, but just two of all the raggle-taggle that drifted along the road—deserters, farmers, cowboys, milkmaids, and even a British patrol now and then to send them diving into the underbrush. They had no money, but the weather was good, and they could sleep in a field and roast sweet corn over a fire.

For Tom Paine, there was a quality of relief in the disbanding of the Philadelphians; the weak went and a few of the strong were left, and he had never had a comrade before like this tall, slow-spoken Pennsylvanian. He read to him from Common Sense, and respect became a bond between them. Morrison told how his wife and child had died, leaving him alone in the dark forest, and trudging along they shared their loneliness and knew each other’s thoughts. In those times, the flatlands of Jersey were not covered with smoking factories and an endless maze of railroads, but between the pine barrens, the sulphur swampland stretched for miles and miles, inhabited only by flocks of whirring birds, by snakes and frogs, desolate by daytime, but shining with an unearthly beauty at dawn and twilight.

Once they passed Elizabethtown, they walked for hours through this silent, stretching plain, for Paine so reminiscent of the British fens. He spoke to Morrison of the things he had seen as a boy in the gin hell of London; hope which had been so low in them rose higher, and the calm spaces of the swamps gave them new courage. Now they laughed at Roberdeau.

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

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

“Who in hell are you?”

“Paine—Tom Paine.”

“And what do you want, god damn you?”

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

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

“Do we still hold it?”

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

“Why did you run away?”

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to.”

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

Paine shook his head dazedly.

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

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

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

“You remember, sir?” they would say.

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

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

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

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

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

“They weren’t cowards,” Paine said.

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

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

“Nothing—”

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

Greene said no, but not with assurance.

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

“It means very little,” Paine protested.

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

“Do you think I can tell them?”

“I think so,” Greene nodded.

“All right.”

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

“No, I don’t think so.”

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

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

“Yes—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paine thanked him.

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

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

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

“No, but the whole garrison—”

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

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

“All right, all right, citizens,” he told them. “A little of this and a little of that. We’re just beginning.”

Then the enemy crossed the Hudson, flanked them, and Greene had to take his garrison out of Fort Lee, double-time, a panic-stricken crowd running down the road to Hackensack, Washington leading them, Greene and old Israel Putnam whipping them along, more panic at Hackensack when they tried to reorganize with the mob, and then the whole rabble plodding out of Hackensack on the road to Newark, less than three thousand of them now; and they, with the five thousand stationed in Westchester under Lee, were all that was left of the twenty thousand continentals who had held New York. It rained and they dragged through the mud, whipped and miserable; they were starting a retreat that had no end in sight, and this was all that remained of the glorious revolution and the glorious army. In Newark they were jeered at by the Jersey citizens who were so sure they were seeing the last act of a miserable drama. They ran, fell, crawled, panted through the town, and scarcely were they out of one end than the British patrols entered the other.

Rain changed to the winter’s first snow on the road to New Brunswick, and marching through the slow-drifting flakes, they were a column of sorry and forlorn ghosts, muskets and rusty bayonets, here and there a cocked hat, a bandage, a cannon or two trundling clumsily, no sound and no song and no cheering, the officers walking their horses with faces bent against the cold. The road was bordered with stone walls, mantled in white now; the fields were dead and flat and the houses Wore masks of shutters.

Paine walked beside a boy whose name was Clyde Matton, and who came from Maine. Carrying his own gun and the boy’s, Paine had an arm around his thin shoulder. “The march is short,” Paine said, “when one minds the road and not the steps.”

“I reckon it’s too long either way.”

“There’ll be a warm fire tonight.”

“Little comfort in that. I’m thinking of going home.”

“Home’s a far way off. There’re few men here, but good men.”

He walked by the carts of the wounded and told them stories. They found him a good story-teller; he could make things sound funny, and he was a fine mimic of accents. Already, he had picked up the vernacular of the various colonies, and he had a deadpan method of delivery, his heavy beaked nose inquiring for effect after each sentence. In spite of what he had gone through, he had never been healthier physically; his large, freckled face inspired confidence, and whether it was a cart mired in the muck or a man fainted from weariness, Paine’s big shoulders and slab-like hands were ready and willing. Before this, strength had meant nothing, the power of mules and work-horses and slaves, but now it was something that gave him a heady sort of happiness—as once, when remaining behind with Knox and Alexander Hamilton and a dozen others to hold a rear guard crossing with a gun, he had alone driven off a flanking attack of dragoons, wading among the horses and sabers and flailing his big musket around his head like a light cane, taking nothing in return but a slight cut over the eye and a powder burn on the cheek. Telling about it admiringly, young Hamilton said:

“He’s filthy and slovenly enough when you come to that, but he’s the bravest man I ever saw, and he has the strength of a madman.”

The bloodstains they left on the road where their bare feet dragged made him refuse Greene’s offer of boots; he wasn’t acting, but he was living the one life that was undeniably his own, this thing called revolution, learning a technique among this defeated, fleeing army, learning the one life he might live.

At night, they made their fires when they could not march a step more, and it was Paine to do the cooking for a hundred men, Paine to calm a boy’s fear, Paine to read a man a letter from his wife and write one in return, Paine to sit with his strong hands clasped about his bent knees and slowly, simply explain what they were suffering for, the politics of an empire and a world, the struggles of mankind from the Romans to now, the new day of small men, not only in America but the world over.

The officers left him alone. He had hardly anything to do with them now, and they, in turn, realized that a dirty, unshaven English staymaker was one of the few things that kept what was left of the American cause from dissolving into thin air.

Washington was not the man Paine had met in Philadelphia, not the long, carefully groomed Virginia aristocrat, not the richest man in America and lord of Mt. Vernon, but haggard and skinny, the face drawn, the light gray eyes bloodshot, the buff and blue uniform, for all its launderings, spotted with dirt-stains and bloodstains. Washington was a man who said to Paine:

“Whatever you can do—”

“It’s little that I can do,” Paine nodded. “If you mean write something, it’s hard to tell a man who is suffering and giving that he must suffer more and give more.”

“I don’t know you,” the Virginian said. “But there are so many things I don’t know now I thought I knew once. I don’t know how to put my faith in a staymaker, but I am doing it. I am glad to call you my friend, Paine, and I would be proud if you’d take my hand, not as the writer of Common Sense, but as one man to another.”

They shook hands, Paine with tears in his eyes.

“If you can write something,” Washington said, “not only for the army but for the whole country. We’re so near to the end—”

Paine was thinking he would die gladly for this man, die or kneel on the ground he walked.

Well, writing was what a writing man should do. With the drum held between his knees, with the top tilted to catch the wavering light of the fire, he scratched and scratched away, all the night through. The men gathered around him, men who knew Paine and loved him, men who had felt the strength of his arms, men who had slogged side by side with him. They read as he wrote, sometimes aloud in their stiff, nasal back-country accents:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.…”

They read:

“If there be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace …”

With bloodshot eyes, they read and spoke softly:

“I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and repulse it.…”

“I thank God that I fear not,” they read, and others on the edge of the crowd begged him, “Read it, Tom.”

“Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or theatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to bind me in all cases whatsoever to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain or by an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.…”

Hard, cruel, vulgar words they understood, and like a harsh and angry roar, their voices came:

“Read it!”