10

REVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

HE FOUND the Congress at York, and curiously enough he was welcomed. A dinner was given for him, and there were Rush, Abington, the Adams cousins, Lee, Hemingway, and others. The guest of honor was Tom Paine, shaven and with a new jacket and shoes. “What he has seen and suffered,” Hemingway said, “should be an inspiration for all of us.” Well-fed, honest men they were; claret was the drink of the evening, bottles sparkling up and down the table like a whole line of British redcoats. James Cranshaw, at whose beautifully furnished home the dinner was given, played host as in old times, carrying in the whole roast suckling pig himself. Two beef and kidney puddings flanked the roast, and two platters of fried chicken flanked the puddings. Hot bread, both corn and wheat, gave off their good smell, and there were cornucopias full of dried fruit. “For the land is plentiful, let it be known far and wide.” Sitting next to Paine, Cranshaw pointed out the beauties of his Philadelphia Chippendale:

“You will note, sir, the simple lines and the undecorated backs of the chairs. For the highboy, I confess nothing equals the mahogany product of Newport, in particular the brothers Granny. For chairs, Philadelphia holds the crown and nothing in England is as good, I say nothing, sir. In New England they desecrate the product with ladder backs and peasant seats of rush; here our sidechairs are quiet songs of beauty, the ball and claw arrived at its final function, the fretted back become Grecian in its gentle curves. Shall one doubt the future of America?”

“I wonder,” Paine thought.

They plied him with food and drink, and they talked of everything under the sun but the war. Not until the meal was done, the flip served, and the ladies had retired to the drawing room, did they come to the point. Then, over snuff and cigars, they pumped Paine about what he had seen at Germantown and Valley Forge.

“But you will admit that the leadership was mediocre?” they prodded him.

“The leadership, gentlemen, is sacrificing and courageous.”

“But stupid.”

“I deny that! Soldiers are not made overnight. We are not Prussians, but citizens of a republic.”

“Yet you cannot deny that Washington has failed constantly. What you told us you saw at Valley Forge is only final proof of his unfitness!”

“Unfitness!” Paine said quietly. “My good gentlemen, God help you!”

“Aren’t you dramatizing, Paine?”

“What is the case in point?” Paine asked. “Do you want to be rid of Washington?”

“Let us say, rather, co-operate with him,” Lee said smoothly. “What Gates has done at Saratoga, his capture of Burgoyne’s entire army, proves—”

“Proves nothing!” Paine snapped. “Have you forgotten that Gates deliberately abandoned Washington at the Delaware last year? I’m not afraid of words, gentlemen, and I’d as soon say traitor as anything else. At a price, Gates will sell, and I am not sure others haven’t a price—” staring from face, to face.

“Paine, you’re drunk!”

“Am I? Then I’ll say what I would never dare to sober—I’ll say, gentlemen, that you disgust me, that you are breaking down all that is decent in our Congress, that you are ready to sell, yes, damn it, ready to sell, and that when you lose Washington, you lose the war—”

The next night, someone tried to kill him, a pistol snapping and missing fire, and a week later a note that said politely that some things are spoken of, some not. But Rush sought him out in a tavern and said:

“Don’t misjudge us, Paine. We aren’t traitors, believe me.”

“But you would rather see me dead?”

“What do you mean?”

Paine told him, and Rush’s face clouded and darkened. He assured Paine that he knew nothing about the attempt. “We are not assassins,” he said grimly.

In the streets of York, one day, he meet Irene Roberdeau. She greeted him warmly and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. She and her uncle were stopping at the Double Coach, and he walked there with her, telling her briefly what he had done since he had last seen her.

“You will never rest,” she said. “You will never have peace, Tom.”

“I suppose not.”

She told him that she was engaged to be married—when they reoccupied Philadelphia. He nodded, and she wondered from his face whether it mattered at all to him.

“We will take Philadelphia again?” she asked.

“I am sure we will.”

“Tom—”

He looked at her.

“It could have been different,” she said.

“I don’t think it could.”

Work piled up as secretary to the committee. Again he was a clerk who sat up nights doing Crisis papers, yet somehow he managed to let his weight be felt, putting pressure on those he knew, speaking constantly of Washington’s need, threatening, using himself as a wedge in the countless little plots, breaking them open, writing false orders to commandeer shoes and clothing, talking to the food brokers, promising everything under the sun, actually maneuvering a shipment of grain toward Valley Forge, drinking again, more than he should, writing words that cut like knives—

A change was coming over things. At the end of that winter of 1777-1778, the crucial point of the war arrived, and the Americans won, not through battles, but simply by existing as an army, as a military force. The tall, unhappy Virginian, who had failed so as a commander, proved his worth as a rallying point, and throughout that dreadful cold winter, he held a nucleus of his men around him. Perhaps if Howe, the British commander, had attacked Valley Forge, the American army—what was left of it—might have been utterly destroyed. But Philadelphia was comfortable, and Howe did not attack, and with spring there was not only a French alliance, the product of old Ben Franklin’s careful work, but a reoccurrence of that incredible phenomenon, the American militia.

Once again the summer soldiers, through with their plowing, poured into the encampment—householders, farm hands, men and boys. The four thousand left after the winter at Valley Forge became seven thousand, then ten, then twelve thousand. And as a nucleus there was the bitter, hard kernel that had kept alive in the hellish encampment.

Howe became frightened. Once he could have been the attacker; now he was in a position to be attacked. He marched out of Philadelphia, north through Jersey; and at Monmouth, Washington barred his path. Not for nothing had three years of war, three desperate, losing years, put iron into the ragged, lean continentals. For the first time they fought and held their ground, stood through the shot and shell and fire of a day’s burning battle, and then lay on their weapons and watched a broken British army retreat from the field.

The war was not over; it was not much more than begun; but now there was an American Army.

Paine was beginning to understand his new profession, the skill called revolution which he was the first to practice as a sole reason for being. He had seen the people take power, and the means by which they took power; he had seen their appointed leaders, citizens whose livelihood was not war, rally them against the enemy. He had seen the counter-revolution rear its head again and again, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Jersey, and in Pennsylvania. He had seen the army split up into opposing groups, and he had seen staunch patriots eager to sell out to the highest bidder. And now he was watching one of the final phases, a cleavage between the people’s party and the party of finance, of trade and power and aristocracy. And strangely enough these latter forces were united against one who was reputedly the wealthiest man in America: the Virginia farmer, Washington. First, it was a plot to deprive Washington of the command and give it to Gates; then, to dirty his reputation and split the high command from him; and now, lastly, a direct sell-out to Great Britain. England sent across the ocean a party of gentlemen with very broad powers; they knew whom to contact. Paine sent a messenger to Washington and wrote with fury in his pen.

A Crisis appeared in which Paine, raging mad, wrote: “What sort of men or Christians must you suppose the Americans to be, who, after seeing their most humble petitions insultingly rejected; the most grievous laws passed to distress them in every quarter; an undeclared war let loose upon them, and Indians and Negroes invited to the slaughter; who, after seeing their kinsmen murdered, their fellow citizens starved to death in prisons, and their houses and property destroyed and burned; who, after the most serious appeals to heaven, the most solemn adjuration by oath of all government connected with you, and the most heart-felt pledges and protestations of faith to each other; and who, after soliciting the friendship, and entering into alliance with other nations, should at last break through all these obligations, civil and divine, by complying with your horrid and infernal proposal.…”

Working underground himself, he fell deeper and deeper into the snarl. He hadn’t the restraint to refrain from direct accusations, yet he could not unearth a scrap of written evidence to back up his suspicions of the plots against the revolution.

Not trusting Samuel Adams—sincerely believing that Adams and a good many others of the Boston crowd could be bought if the proposals were properly put, the price high enough, and the settlement such as to give them the positions they longed for—he could, nevertheless, find no solid grounds upon which to accuse them. And Richard Henry Lee, stopping him on the street, told him bitterly:

“You seem to enjoy making enemies, Paine.”

“I have so many that a few more don’t matter.”

“A friend might help. A quiet tongue might, too.”

“My only friend is the revolution. And my tongue wags like the tongue of any damned peasant.”

“Just a word of warning—”

“I don’t have to be warned, my friend,” Paine smiled.

And then, hard on that, came the affair of Silas Deane.

As secretary to die Committee for Foreign Affairs, Paine had come, time and again, upon some very curious matters. There was a European firm called Roderique Hortalez and Company. He himself had had some dealings with them when things were most desperate the winter before. It was a matter of military boots for an army that bound their bleeding feet in rags and sackcloth, and a Mr. Steffins of Charleston said he might obtain a thousand pair of good boots—for a price. The price was a livre a pair; that was high, but in wartime one expects things to come high. Paine negotiated the deal, and when the boots arrived they proved to be of Spanish leather—and the bill was presented by Roderique Hortalez and Company. The company was already widely known among the continentals, but who had hired Mr. Steffins and who had paid him? Going into the matter, Paine discovered that almost all outside help to America—shiploads of wheat from France, flatboat fleets of powder, shot and cannon that came upriver from New Orleans, cargoes of rum from the Indies, clothing from Spain, dried cheese from Holland, even one consignment of Scotch plaid that had somehow been smuggled from the British Isles—all bore bills of sale from Roderique Hortalez and Company.

Too many people seemed to know all about Roderique Hortalez and Company; too many who were unwilling to talk. For Paine to get details was like pulling teeth. Henry Laurens, the president of the Congress, an honest man trying to fight his way through a wilderness of lies, deceits, and selfishness, one whom Paine respected and liked, told him:

“What does it matter, so long as it helps the cause?”

“But the prices,” Paine pointed out.

Laurens had smiled; that was some time ago.

From Arthur Lee in Paris came word that it was a probability, no more than that, that both France and Spain had made secret gifts to America, possibly as much as a million livres apiece. Deane was getting a five per cent commission on all sales through the company, and bills were being presented. Then, in a letter from Franklin, Paine found what he considered almost conclusive proof that all supplies were purchased with a gift of gold from the two governments, a gift handled by a mysterious and incredible person called Caron de Beaumarchais, incredible because he appeared to be the power behind Roderique Hortalez and Company, mysterious because the French government preferred him so, being not yet at war with England when the funds were advanced to him. A neutral power could not show preferences among belligerents, but an international concern could deal with whom it pleased.

To all this, Henry Laurens had said, “What does it matter?” smiling. Nations could very well act like children about international affairs; face had to be preserved. The world knew that the Continental Congress was perhaps the most impoverished governing power on earth, that it had hardly enough money to buy pen, paper, and ink for the sessions.

Thus, when bills began to be presented to the Committee for Foreign Affairs, they were politely ignored, recorded, filed, but ignored. One understood those matters.

“But did one?” Paine wondered.

He asked Roberdeau to arrange a small dinner at which Laurens would be present, and then he carefully led the talk to the subject of the bills.

“Why do you harp on that, Paine?” Laurens asked, somewhat impatiently. “Those bills will never be presented for payment. France is at war with England now and the goods advanced to us by Hortalez, or shall I say by the French ministry through Hortalez, are only a mere fraction of the military advantage France has gained through the years we have been at war. Franklin made that plain.”

“Yet if Hortalez and Company demand payment, it would be rather embarrassing for France to insist that we had received the goods as gifts. Do you know what the bills amount to?”

“I have some idea,” Laurens said testily.

“They amount to four and a half million livres,” said Paine. “Beaumarchais can become a millionaire—we’ve paid double for everything, you see—if they present claims. Even Deane’s five per cent would make him a rich man.”

Roberdeau whistled and Laurens shook his head. “I had no idea it was that much.”

“The greatest swindle of our time,” Paine prodded.

“What do you propose to do?”

“Attack Deane before payment is demanded and what miserable credit we have is broken.”

“You have no proof that Deane expects to receive a commission. First the bills must be presented for payment.”

“Proof—my God, isn’t it proof enough that Deane handled all the negotiations. If the goods are a gift, Deane gets nothing; if we are forced to pay, Deane is a rich man.”

Hard on that dinner, the scandal broke. Beaumarchais, through the mysterious firm of Hortalez, flung his hand into the pot of fortune and demanded payment, and Deane came back to America to collect. The split that had been brewing for so long in America, between the party of the people and the party of trade and power, snapped wide open. Congress, writhing under the impact of four and a half million livres that could never be repaid, demanded of the French ambassador:

“Was or was not the money a gift?”

“It was,” they were assured, but it could not be acknowledged publicly. The honor of France was at stake.

Hortalez again demanded payment; Deane appeared before Congress and smilingly asked for his five per cent. He was not afraid; he knew too much about Congress, too much about what went on in France with Arthur Lee and Franklin. When Congress refused to hear him, he took his case to the papers, attacking the whole Lee family, declaring himself the savior of his country and asking for justice. That was more than Paine could stand, and he wrote a furious, biting reply.

Deane claimed credit for the supplies sent to America. Paine opened the books of the Committee for Foreign Affairs and proved that the French and Spanish gifts had been made before Silas Deane ever went to France. Philadelphia began to boil.

And then the French ambassador, Gerard, saw Paine privately and told him, “This must not go on.”

“Why?” Paine asked bluntly.

“For reasons I cannot explain. Certain personages are involved. You must drop your attack on Deane.”

“And if I refuse?”

Gerard shrugged and spread his hands. “Do you refuse?”

“I am sorry,” Paine nodded. “This thing we are doing; it isn’t a little intrigue for the crowned heads of Europe—it’s revolution, do you understand.”

“I understand,” Gerard said, and the next day told Congress:

“All the supplies furnished by Monsieur de Beaumarchais to the States, whether merchandise or cannon or military goods, were furnished in the way of commerce, and the articles which came from the King’s magazine and arsenals were sold to Monsieur de Beaumarchais by the department of artillery, and he has furnished his obligations for the price of these articles.”

Paine writhed and pleaded to Roberdeau, “Proof—if only I had proof.” He wrote bitterly of Deane:

“It fell not to his lot to turn out to a winter’s campaign, and sleep without tent or blanket. He returned to America when the danger was over, and has since that time suffered no personal hardship. What then are Mr. Deane’s sufferings and what the sacrifices he complains of? Has he lost money in the public service? I believe not. Has he got any? That I cannot tell.…”

Gerard did not warn Paine again; he sought out the faction in Congress that hated Paine so bitterly. Congress acted, summoned Paine, and demanded whether he wrote Common Sense to the Public on Mr. Deane’s Affair.

“I wrote it,” Paine acknowledged.

In secret session, Congress attacked Paine mercilessly; he heard rumors of what was going on, but was denied all his pleas to answer the charges. He heard that the wealthy Gouverneur Morris of New York had said, during session:

“What would be the idea of a gentleman in Europe of this Mr. Paine? Would he not suppose him to be a man of the most affluent fortune, born in this country of a respectable family, with wide and great connections, and endued with the nicest sense of honor? Certainly he would suppose that all these pledges of fidelity were necessary to a people in our critical circumstances. But, alas, what would he think, should he accidentally be informed, that this, our Secretary of Foreign Affairs, was a mere adventurer from England, without fortune, without family or connections, ignorant even of grammar?”

Laurens told Paine, “Resign before they have a chance to dismiss you. God knows what is coming, Paine—I don’t.” And Laurens added, “I am doing the same, you see. They will have to find a new president for their Congress.”

Paine resigned.

And in Philadelphia hell was brewing.

Only outwardly was Philadelphia tranquil, and even that tranquillity was fast disappearing. The Quaker city was a revolutionary capital, occupied by the British, reoccupied by the Americans. It was not only geographically the center of the states, but ideologically as well, for Boston soon cooled and the Massachusetts farmers, who had once ripped a British army to shreds at Concord and Lexington, had for the most part gone back to their spades and plows. Their cold, bitter Yankee sense of personal freedom was bound inextricably with their own rocky land, and their fierce individuality made them poor material for any other warfare than the kind they fell into instinctively, guerrilla tactics. That guerrilla warfare might have ended the struggle much sooner was beside the point; it was not being fought that way, and the Yankees drifted off.

The bulk of the struggle was left to the midlanders, Pennsylvania men for the most part, Jersey men and New York men, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland regiments; and in the South, Virginia and Carolina men. But the core of the regulars, the men who starved and froze and thirsted, the few thousand who clung by the spare figure of Washington in the worst of times, were almost all Pennsylvania and Jersey men. For them, Philadelphia was the altar of revolution, and for them, the blackest day came when Congress fled without even an attempt to defend the city.

The British, who considered the city worthless, since they already held New York and could not afford troops to garrison both towns, had evacuated it with as little attempt at defense as the Americans before them. Marching to reoccupy the place on the heels of the redcoats, the continentals were not happy or gentle. They wanted revenge, and some they took. The city was dirty, littered, houses in ruins, houses looted, the beautiful Philadelphia Chippendale, the pride of the colonies, hacked and ripped and broken. The Americans walked back into the city with their bayonets bared. Wayne, a hard knife-blade of a man, led the Pennsylvanians. “A Tory,” he said to a committee of important citizens, “is a son of a bitch with — inside of him.” They were used to strong language, but not that strong. They proclaimed their loyalty.

“As I understand loyalty,” Wayne said, “so I would make you understand it—”

But to untangle the Tory from the rebel was impossible. Of the thousands of citizens who had remained behind when the British came, who was to say which was loyal and which was not? Of informers, there were plenty, but even those most bitter shied away from the bloody terror that wholesale accusation would bring. The midlanders were hard men, but not that hard.

And Pennsylvania was a democracy. Of all the countries that made up the union, Pennsylvania was the nearest to a government of workers and farmers—militant workers and farmers who had framed their own liberal constitution, their own single-house form of government in the days when the war started. The backbone of this group were the leatherclad frontiersmen who had sworn that they would have a thing or two to say with their long rifles before the aristocrats took their land.

Into this brew was flung the Silas Deane affair—to split it wide open.

Roberdeau showed Paine a letter, addressed to Robert Morris, who had lately cornered the flour market of the midlands. The letter had come to Roberdeau through means he was not anxious to disclose; there were ways. The line he pointed out read, “It would be a good thing for the welfare of the gentle folk of the country if Mister Thomas Paine were dead.…”

“If they wish to, they can kill me,” Paine shrugged. “They’ve tried before—”

“Don’t be a fool. The time is over when you can fight this thing alone.”

“What do you suggest?”

Roberdeau suggested that they show their hand. He offered his house for a meeting place. He knew a few who could be trusted, and Paine knew a few. Tomorrow night, he said.

“Tomorrow night,” Paine agreed. He was very tired; a man could take up a gun, preach revolution, write papers pleading with his fellow citizens to support the war, unearth plots, oppose factions, lose his reputation and his livelihood, be hated and despised, scream aloud that men fought and died, that Philadelphia did not exist for the sole purpose of raising the price of food, clothes, munitions, livestock—but a man reached his limits. It was not easy to know that people wanted to kill you; it made him afraid the way he had never been afraid on the battlefield; it made him afraid of dark streets, afraid to drink too much, afraid to sleep in his miserable two-shilling room without locking the door.

The last time he had looked in the mirror, it was with the sudden realization that he was growing old. A network of little lines picked out his eyes and cheeks. That was Paine, the staymaker. Irene Roberdeau was married and carrying a child. The world went on, but facing him in his mirror was Paine, the mendicant of revolution.

It was a good group that gathered at Roberdeau’s house, Paine told himself. A solid group, each person picked, each to be depended on.

There was David Rittenhouse, the scientist and mechanic, a person of substance, but nevertheless one who had worked with his hands; there was Jackson Garland, who, before his forge had been destroyed by the British, had cast forty-nine cannon for Harry Knox. Garland was Scotch, thin and sour in appearance, but a man with a mind, one who had often explained to Paine his theory of the coming trade unions. There was Charles Wilson Peale, captain in the Continental Army, a painter of amazing skill, and completely devoted to Washington. There was Colonel Matlack, a Quaker who had decided that some things were worth fighting for, who had said publicly that he would die fighting his own brothers before he saw the Morris clique destroy the Pennsylvania constitution. And there were young Thomas Shany and Franklin Pearce, both captains and veterans of Wayne’s Pennsylvania Line. In addition they could count on the active support of both Laurens and Jefferson, neither of whom was present.

Roberdeau had wine and cake served, and then called the meeting to order. The group was quiet, grave, and somewhat bewildered; vaguely they sensed the possibilities and results of an open split in the Continental Party, and for that reason they felt they were treading on gunpowder. Organized revolt was still a very new thing in the world; organized radicalism, splitting from the rightists within the body of the revolution, was entirely new.

Roberdeau, his fleshy face red and excited, suggested that Paine take the floor and explain the purpose of the meeting. To which Paine pointed out anxiously:

“I don’t want to intrude myself. It might be said that I am the least of the company here. I feel—”

“Damn it, no! This is no time for hedging nor politeness,” Matlack said. “You know what this is, and go ahead and speak, Paine.”

Paine looked around at the others; heads nodded. Paine said, speaking quietly but swiftly, “I don’t need much of a preamble. A time was when revolution was new to all of us, but we’ve lived with it a good many years now—perhaps not long enough to understand it completely, to know the whole devil in this broth we’re brewing, but long enough to have some comprehension of its structure. Revolution is a method of force by a party not in power, as we understand it by the party of the people, which has never been in power in the history of this earth. When the thirteen states of our confederation aroused themselves to seize the power, the confederation as a whole was in revolt against the British Empire. That we recognize, and the confederation as a whole is now engaged in war with the sovereign state of Great Britain.

“That is one thing. But the same method of revolution was singularly applied in each of the states of the confederation, and in each of the states the party of the people fought for the power. In some states, the people won; in others they lost, but in no case was the issue clear-cut. The act of revolution goes on in thirteen lands on this continent; there is civil war everywhere; in New York a man takes his life in his hands if he dares travel alone through Westchester County. In Massachusetts, the Tories are so powerful that they openly paint their chimneys with bands of black to identify themselves. In the lake country the Tories and the Indians have allied themselves, in such power as to engage our armies in force. In the Carolinas brother fights brother, and whole families have been wiped out by this civil strife. No one who traveled through the Jerseys in the retreat of seventy-six will ever forget how the whole countryside rose against us, shot at us from behind their shuttered windows, let us starve, just as they let us starve in Valley Forge a year later.

“In only one place did the revolution triumph, instantly, decisively, and without doubt, and that is here in Pennsylvania, the wealthiest land on this continent, perhaps the most loyal, certainly the most powerful. If the midlands fall, then the revolution falls; and if the midlands go up in smoke, who will say that the Pennsylvania line will not desert Washington and march back to defend their homes?

“Though I don’t have to remind you, let me briefly reconsider the revolutionary enactments of Pennsylvania. You remember how, even before Concord and Lexington, the working men of Philadelphia formed themselves into an armed citizenry. Alone, unskilled as they were in any sort of warfare, they might not have triumphed, but fortunately they were joined by several thousand hunters and home-steaders from the back country. It was by the long rifle and the buckskin as well as by the musket that we overthrew the anticonstitutionalists. The aristocrats gave way when we threatened them with civil war and when they saw our guns. We won a constitution and we won a democratic state legislature, and then, loyal to the confederation, we sent our men by the thousands to fight with General Washington. I saw that myself. I was at Newark when the Pennsylvanians held the rear, at Valley Forge when they lay in the snow and starved, but held; at Monmouth our buckskin men broke the British backs. And, gentlemen, I was at the Delaware in seventy-six, when Washington fled across to the poor safety of the west bank, when he ordered a count and there were eight hundred men—eight hundred to defend the future of men of good will and make a nation out of this suffering of ours—and then I saw something that I will not forget if I live a hundred years, I saw the working men of Philadelphia, twelve hundred strong, march up from the city and hold the Delaware line until Sullivan joined with Washington. Six months before, the Associators ran away, and that was to the shame of no one; it takes six months of hell to put iron into a man’s soul, and when they marched up out of Philadelphia again, the clerks and masons and smiths and millers, weavers, mercers—they were different. Pennsylvania gave freely, and now we have our deserts.

“Congress fled and gave our city to the British and Tories. We have it back so that it can become the speculator’s dream, so that Deane can fleece us, so that Morris can corner flour, so that Graves can run up the price of tobacco twenty-two dollars a barrel, so that Jamison can pile up his wool on the river front while the army freezes, so that Mr. Jamie Wilson, whom you know as well as I, can corner a million dollars’ worth of back-country land—easy enough with the woodsmen away fighting—and not content with that, attack everything the people of this state have fought for through his rotten and seditious paper, the Packet. And he has as his good ally, the equally vicious Evening Post. All this, gentlemen, is not a matter of chance, but a concerted attack against the revolution in Pennsylvania. The so-called Republican Society of Mr. Robert Morris is about as much republican as George the Third; its sole purpose, as far as I can see, is to destroy the constitution in which lies the power of the people.

“I think I have talked too much, gentlemen. There is the situation which I was trying to fight alone, and which General Roberdeau thinks we can fight better together. I leave the rest to you—”

No applause; he sat down in silence, all of them watching him. He was very tired, and his head ached. Matlack said thoughtfully, thinking aloud more than anything else:

“Whatever we do, we will need the means of force. Washington—”

“I think he’ll be with us,” Rittenhouse nodded.

“Will he, though?”

Paine said yes. Peale said direct action: if men were profiteering, they would be brought before a tribunal, judged, punished. The constitution would be defended by force—

“Then that’s civil war.”

“So be it. They’ve asked for it.”

“Support?”

“Bring this out in the open and people will declare themselves. Then we’ll know.”

Roberdeau sighed; he was growing old; peace was a dream now. Worried, Rittenhouse said they must move cautiously, cautiously.

“To hell with that!”

“Bloodshed—”

“They’ve asked for it,” Garland said harshly. Most of them took that stand; they had been with the army; when campaigning started, they would be with the army again. But, Paine pointed out, this thing must come of the people. Peale suggested a mass meeting, and Roberdeau said he would organize it. A vote was taken, and the others agreed to the method.

They shook hands and each went home. No one smiled. It was something a long time coming, and now that it was here, they were not happy.

The meeting was held at the State House, in the court yard. Several hundred people attended, and both Paine and Roberdeau spoke. Matlack moved for the establishment of a Committee of Inspection, and an open vote was taken. Paine was the first elected, then Colonel Smith, a solid supporter of the Constitution, a militiaman and therefore from the people. Rittenhouse, Matlack, and Peale finished the roster. The crowd was grim and earnest. The Republican Society had tried heckling, but the crowd was too somber for that, and it was only by the efforts of Rittenhouse and Roberdeau that violence was avoided.

The next day Peale and Paine dined with Captain Hardy, in command of a company of Pennsylvania regulars, temporarily bivouacked in the city. Peale explained what was coming. “I’m afraid of the mob,” he said. “If your men support us—”

At first, Hardy refused. It was not in his province. If Wayne agreed—

“But there’s no time for that!”

They argued for an hour, and then Hardy agreed to put it up to the men. Both Paine and Peale spoke, and the troops, after some consultation among themselves, agreed to support them.

In a way, war had been declared in Philadelphia.

The city knew. It was like an armed camp. Men kept their muskets at hand; mobs roamed the streets; there was work for Peale’s company of troops. The Committee of Inspection set up its tribunal, and merchant after merchant was hauled before it, ordered to explain their business, ordered to produce books and vouchers. A Mr. Donny was found to have thirty-six hundred pairs of shoes in his warehouse, purchase price averaging eleven dollars, asking price, sixty dollars. Paine prepared the evidence carefully. A Mr. Solikoff, a mysterious gentleman of Baltimore, was found to be Morris’s partner in cornering the flour market. Indictments were drawn up.

The Philadelphia Post had a rush of courage and attacked Paine more scathingly and filthily than ever before. Paine would have let the matter pass. “It’s not the first time,” he explained.

But they were out in the open now. Matlack had the Post building surrounded by soldiers, and Towne, the publisher, was asked whether he would like to hang by the neck for a while. The warning was enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you can—” the Scot smiled.

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

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

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

In the Crisis Extraordinary he was at his calmly furious best, appealing to the merchants for a common front, begging them to believe that only in a democracy could a man of business have full play for his abilities. In the Crisis on Public Good, he begged the confederation to fight together, not to fall out among themselves, not to let regional differences turn them from the common enemy. He began to think of a national government now; what had happened in Pennsylvania was a warning.

There was a week of sheer drunkenness when his brain bogged down, when he felt he was over and through and could go on no longer, and then he came out of it, thinner than before, yet more resolute—with a scheme for carrying the revolution to England personally. He would go there himself. A Common Sense to the British citizen, the British working man and farmer.

Nathanael Greene talked him out of that. The Benedict Arnold affair had just run its course, and the British were burning with the execution of André.

“If they could hang Paine,” Greene said, “that would even things. I am afraid we still need you.”

Suddenly, not in a day nor a week, but suddenly enough after all the years, the war was being won, not over yet, no treaty of peace signed, but nevertheless won, the heartache and hopelessness finished, a British army trapped at York-town, the British cause in America torn to shreds, a French grant of several millions solving the financial problem, the Tories shattered. Then it was Paine alone and frightened, looking at all this, and wondering, “Where am I? Who am I?”

The props had been knocked from under him; always on the outside, always the man behind the scenes, always the propagandist, he found a time now when there was no need for propaganda, no need for men behind the scenes. In a victorious army, the pleading, exhorting figure of Paine would stir only laughter. His trade was revolution, and now he was without a trade.

“Go back to staymaking then,” he told himself morosely. His friends, his companions were turning their hand to statecraft, construction; others were grabbing, because victory meant spoils. And he, who was so definitely not a statesman, had no desire for spoils.

There was a trip to France. His old friend and the onetime president of the Congress, Henry Laurens, had been taken prisoner by the British while sailing to Holland. Paine, who knew Laurens’ son, tried to lift the boy out of his misery.

“It won’t be forever,” he told John Laurens. “There’ll be an exchange of prisoners soon. The war will be over—”

Paine had a way with men, and the boy came to worship him. Then, when young Laurens went to Paris to help push the French loan, he begged Paine to accompany him, and Paine, who saw his work on this side of the ocean coming to an end, agreed. In a way, it was a holiday, the first he had ever known in all his life, he an honored visitor in France, men of distinction begging him to autograph their copies of Common Sense, making him understand, as he had never understood before, that he, Paine, really mattered.

It was over all too soon. The mission was successful; everything, it seemed, was successful now, and Paine, coming home on a ship loaded down with two and a half millions of livres in silver, could not help reflecting on the curious change in the little union of colonies which called itself America. As for instance when he wrote his last Crisis paper, just before the trip to France. No trouble about publishers then; a dozen printers clamored for the privilege of printing it. Crisis papers were safe investments now that the crisis had passed.

They asked Paine to dinner soon after he had returned to America, Mrs. Jackson, who had been Irene Roberdeau, and her husband. Frank Jackson had no jealousy of Paine; he said to Irene, quietly, “Why, he’s almost an old man!”

Irene was still young and lovely. As she sat with her child at her knee, she confirmed Paine’s aging lassitude. He was old; he was finished; it was only in a dream that he had dared to love this woman.

“What are you going to do now, Thomas?” she asked him.

And he tried to smile his way out of it, implying that there would be much to do. He was a busy man, he said, so much writing, so many dinners—

“The revolution is done,” Frank Jackson said, and there was nothing for Paine but to agree.

“They won’t forget you.”

A sop to him. “Why should it matter?” he muttered.

“You look so tired,” Irene said.

He was tired; damned tired and wanting to get out of this place and get good and drunk. Who were these people, and how did he come to be sitting there in their house? Who was he but a wandering staymaker who had been something else for a while?

“You’ll need a rest,” Irene said.

“I imagine I will,” he agreed. After that, he could not get away quickly enough.

He was not even the clerk of the Assembly now—nothing, Tom Paine, former revolutionist, a little more ragged than usual, a little more empty under his belt. The expected thing after Yorktown was a spree, and he had been drunk for four days; but that didn’t go on. You had to eat and drink; you found that shoe leather wore out; you needed a room, no matter how small and dirty and disreputable.

The loneliness was not to be abated. Roberdeau had gone to Boston. Greene was campaigning in Carolina, and when he wrote that it would be like old days if only Paine were with him, Paine thought ruefully, “Not like old days. I was needed then. I’m no part of victory.”

Wayne was knifing through Georgia with the now famous Pennsylvania Line; the best soldiers in the world they were called. The years made a difference; Paine could remember five hundred of them by name.

Washington came to Philadelphia for a triumph, but it was a hollow triumph; his stepson had just died. The tall Virginian looked wasted and empty, and when he called for Paine, they were like two men left over. Paine was ashamed of his dirty clothes, his appearance, his mottled face.

“My old friend,” Washington said.

Paine began to brag; he was thinking of doing a history of the revolution. Did Washington know how many copies of Common Sense had been printed?

“I know my own value,” Paine boasted.

Thinking of how perspectives changed, of what a wretched creature this scribbler was, away from the campfires and dis-illusioned, mutinous men, Washington smiled and said, “My dear Paine, no one of us will ever forget your value.” Why did revolution leave such a backwash? Everyone was looking for rewards, but how did this fit into a world of peace and order?

“Even Morris recognizes what you have done,” Washington said quickly. “On two fronts, the home front and the fighting front, it was Paine who kept the cause together—I tell you that with the deepest conviction, my good friend—”

They parted soon after, and Washington was not there to see Paine weep.

A delegation of rank and file soldiers called upon him. Months and months of back pay was owed to them; would Paine be their spokesman? Would Paine organize their demand and present it to the government? No one knew better than Paine what they had suffered through the years of war; no one had been closer to them than Paine. His pen had flashed fire for the revolution, and now had it a little fire left for those who had fought the revolution?

“Our aims are being accomplished,” Paine told them wearily. “Now you must wait. Any sort of demands backed by force would be close to sedition—”

The soldiers stared at him dumbfounded.

He took the case to Robert Morris, the minister of finance. “Of course, their claims are just,” he pointed out to Morris. No one could say otherwise. But was this the time? Could Morris do something?

“Something, naturally,” Morris said. It seemed so long ago that they were fighting each other. “These men are deserving, they will be paid,” Morris assured Paine. “You were right not to encourage sedition. If the war may be considered won, then certain legal practices must be observed—”

Thoughtfully, Morris said, “You could turn your very considerable writing ability to our use, Paine. The government could be made to realize—”

“I didn’t come for that.”

“No, merely a thought, let us leave it in a place where we can take it up again.” After a moment, Morris said, “There is no reason why we should be enemies.”

Paine nodded and left; of course, no reason. Revolution and counter-revolution were done now. Men turned their hands to reasonable things.

Some writing, drawing pay from a government that no longer needed him, a new suit of clothes, a piece explaining the revolution to Europe, an emasculated piece, another Crisis with a touch of the old fire—why isn’t peace formalized?

A few weeks with Kirkbride. Old soldiers dropped in; they talked of a thousand years ago, when they marched from Hackensack to the Delaware; but there was another trend of talk. The future bulked bright and large in America.

But how for him?

Desperately, he tried to interest himself in the future of America, the spoils and the glory, the boasting and memories, the speculations, the coming boom, the pride of being a free citizen in a great republic.

“Where freedom is not, there is my country,” he had said once.

The peace came; America strutted like a peacock, free and independent. Fireworks and flag-waving and speeches and banquets and glory without end.

A tired Englishman who was once a staymaker, among other things, wrote:

“The times that tried men’s souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.…”

He might have signed it: Tom Paine, revolutionist at large.