Citizen Tom Paine (6 page)

“If it means war—” they said softly to one another.

But, of course, it wouldn't mean war; it simply couldn't; they talked down any suggestion of danger; they talked and talked and talked, and all the words made them certain that everything would come out in the best way possible. They drank that peculiar, vile American concoction, flip, by the hundreds of gallons, and on October 27, 1774, they disbanded, saddled their horses, and started on the long ride home.

Some months afterwards, the London, Dover, and Thetford staymaker, Tom Paine, devoured the record of all they had said and didn't think it too wordy. “Words pile up,” he said, “and afterwards men do things. First the words.” He was holding out at the Ridgeway Coffee Shop with Clare Benton, the printer, Judah Perez, the Jewish fur trader, Anthony Bent, a smith, and Captain Isaac Lee of the Philadelphia militia.

“This is a new thing here,” Paine said. “That's why no one knows what to do.”

“When the time comes to fight, we'll know what to do,” Captain Lee insisted, giving stubborn emphasis to a theme he had repeated over and over.

“No, we have to know what to do first. It's no use to fight if you don't know what you're fighting for. Even if you win, it's no good.”

“And I think,” Perez put in, “that if you know what you're fighting for, it doesn't make too much difference if you win or lose.”

“You don't lose,” Paine said heatedly. “This is like no other thing the world has seen; it's new; it's a beginning, and it has to be explained. We have something here, and yet we haven't got it, and suppose we lose it and it slips through our fingers?”

“Then we're as well off,” Bent grinned.

“Are we? You don't know; you're American! I came from back there!”

“What does that mean?” Benton demanded. “You shook the king's hand?”

“I didn't even spit in his face,” Paine said sourly.

“That kind of talk is still treason.”

“Is it? Treason's a word for a lot of things.”

“Easy, easy,” the smith said.

“I go easy,” Paine said. “Believe me, I hate no man for what he is, not even that fat German bastard, George the Third. But I've seen man nailed to a cross, nailed there for God knows how many thousands of years, nailed with lies, oppression, gunpowder, swords. Now someone puts an ax in my hand, and I have a chance to help cut down that cross. I don't pass that chance by.” Paine's voice was loud; his words rang out, and by the time he had finished speaking, half the men in the coffee house were gathered about the table. Someone put in, “Is it Independence you're talking?”

“Independence is a word.”

“You seem almighty fond of words.”

“And not afraid of them!” Paine roared. “I come into a land of free men and find them afraid of the one word that would bind their freedom! This is a land of promise, and there is no other on earth!”

He was quieter on paper than vocally. All his life he had wanted to write, and now he had a whole magazine at his disposal. The more writing he did on his pound a week, the better pleased Aitken was, and Paine could see a good deal of reason in his desire to keep the magazine on the fence. His writing wasn't good, but he poured it onto paper—essays, bad poems, scientific research, even a letter or two to the great Benjamin Franklin. Fortunately for him, the literary taste of the Pennsylvania people was sufficiently untutored for them to accept Paine and the magazine and the dozen pen names he used—and even to be somewhat enthralled by the breathless pace of his energy. All at once Paine was a theologian, a historian, and a scientist, and he brought into the magazine the wide knowledge of a staymaker, a cobbler, a weaver, and an exciseman. The combination was good, and the circulation went up steadily.

But Paine couldn't stay quiet; he had too many memories, too many sleepless nights, too many dreams. Looking out of his windows, he would see the white chattel slaves being sold in the market. And there were other things he would see as, pen poised, he remembered all the years before now.

“I'll be raising yer wages,” Aitken said to him one day.

He had respectability, position, a job—and yet he had nothing. His torments drove him to the brothels where were kept the limp-eyed, half-foolish bondwomen, brought over from England and Scotland by regular firms of dealers, selling their poor peasant graces to all comers for three shillings, sixpence of which was supposed to go for their freedom. Yet somehow none of them got their freedom, but became hard, painted, vile-tongued tarts. For Paine, there was no relief in those places, and even when he bought freedom for two of the girls, his conscience was not eased.

Rum was a way out. He went back to the bottle, and was drunk more and more frequently. Deep in his cups, he had a run-in with Ben Frady, the Tory mouthpiece, and they were both dragged off before the magistrate.

Aitken said, “Yer dirt, and back to the dirt ye go.”

“God damn you, shut up!”

“Be none too certain with yer damn Whiggish way. That pound more will no' go on yer salary.”

“Go to hell!” Paine yelled.

Then, one night, he sat in front of his candles and wrote and wrote. It came from the heart and now he had no trouble with words. All his hatred for slavery poured onto the paper, all his pent-up fury. And not able to print it himself, he went out in the morning and posted it to a rival magazine. A week later it was printed, and that same day Aitken rushed in holding it in his hand.

“Be this yours?” he cried.

“That it is,” Paine nodded.

“Then out ye go and back to the dirt!”

“Do you have another editor for a pound a week?” Paine smiled.

“I give ye a month's notice!”

“Make it two months,” Paine said, “or by God, I'll make it two weeks.”

And that night, for the first time in a long while, Tom Paine slept quietly and easily without the benefit of drink.

It was the twenty-fourth of April, seventeen seventy-five, the slow end of a cool, bright spring afternoon. Long, rich shadows lay over the cobbled streets, and on the air, blowing from the inland hills, was the tangy smell of growing things, new leaves, turned dirt. On that quiet afternoon, the streets of Philadelphia rang with hard-driven hoofbeats, and a lathered rider on a lathered horse drove to a halt in front of the City Tavern. He yelled that he had news, big news, mighty news, and from every side people came running. Then the rider refused to talk until he had finished off a mug of beer, and as a good horseman should, seen his horse wiped and watered. While he drank, the word spread like wildfire, and the crowd became larger and larger. Paine, who was at his shop, heard men shouting, and ran along with the rest.

“It's war,” the rider said, wiping his lips. “It's bloody damn war!”

Someone gave him a pinch of snuff; others kept back the crowd.

“Of course, they knew that Hancock and Adams were at Lexington,” he said.

Coherency was asked for: dates, details, background.

“That was April eighteenth,” he said.

There was a sudden hush; news went slowly, but events moved fast, and with startled, pale faces the men and women in the crowd looked at each other.

“They were at Pastor Clark's house,” the messenger went on. “That was all right. Men went out of Boston to warn them, and there was time enough, since the redcoats went on foot and our boys rode like hell. And Pastor Clark kept a cool head; he sent them away.”

“They weren't captured, Hancock and. Adams?”

“They got away.”

Again the hush; the journalists scribbled furiously, but the rest waited, and the only sound was the shrieking of children who scurried like hares on the outside of the crowd. The rider called for another mug of beer, and it was rushed through the crowd.

“He couldn't send the whole town away,” the messenger said. “They were all awake, and most of them stayed awake—” There was more talk, more beer, more questions. Bit by bit the whole story came out, haltingly some of it, some with a rush, sometimes a long break when the rider just stared and attempted to comprehend the events he was narrating.

That night of the eighteenth, few of the Lexington villagers slept. Most of those who were dragged home by their wives dressed themselves and slipped away, taking gun, powderhorn, and bullet pouch with them, to join the group at the tavern. The devil walked tonight, but angels were behind him; there was never such a night before, and there wouldn't be one again. The men at the tavern talked in whispers, although they could have shouted and not found a sleeping body to be wakened, and they fingered their guns nervously, counted their bullets, and wondered whether to shoot a man was any different from shooting squirrels and rabbits. Captain Parker, their commander, who had seen guns go off during the French War, was none too easy himself, and found it difficult to answer all the questions flung at him.

A while before dawn, out of a need to do something, Parker sent Zeke Sudberry over to the church to set the bells ringing. Zeke rang until everyone in the village was thoroughly awake, the women with their heads out the windows crying, “Shame, shame that a lot of grown men don't know any better!”

Parker told his men to fall in, which they did rather self-consciously, grinning at each other, whispering back and forth:

“Fine soldier you are, Isaac.”

“Click your heels, Jed. Act like you got a real fancy waistcoat on.”

And to fourteen-year-old Jerry Hicks, “Now, Jerry, why don't you go home and study your lessons.”

“Forward march!” Parker shouted, and they stamped over to the lawn in front of the Congregational Church. Once there, Parker scratched his head, seemingly unable to think of a further movement. The pastor, a light fowling piece in his hand, came out and said, “Bless my soul, and it isn't Sunday.”

It was nice having him there, and everyone became easier and began to talk a great deal. The gray of the dawn was now changing to pastel pink and peach and taupe, and across the fields the crows screamed angrily, “Caw, caw, caw!” Joshua Lang's dog, who was a fool for any sort of bird noise, ran toward the crows, barking at the top of his lungs.

Then the talk stopped; they stiffened; they looked at one another. There was another sound in the world. Faintly, thinly at first, and then more clearly, and then sharp and hard came the beating of drums, the shrilling of pipes, a mocking swinging cadence, an invitation to glory, death—and God only knows what else.

No one had to say who it was; they knew, and no one spoke. Leaning on their guns in that cheerful April morning, tense, frightened most of them, knowing for the first time in their lives an overpowering desire to run away, men, boys, old gaffers, children, the simple folk of a simple New England farming community, they kept their appointment with destiny.

At the City Tavern in Philadelphia, the rider had his fourth glass of beer and said, “They stood, by God!”

“A fight?” someone asked.

“Hell, man! I said they stood. Boy and man, they faced up and goddamned the redcoats all to hell.”

“And then?”

“You never saw a bloody lobster turn his back on a gun,” the messenger snorted.

The redcoat troops marched to within a dozen yards of the villagers before their officer commanded them to halt, and then they stood in their precise files, in their precise and colorful uniforms, in their great shakos, in their white wigs and white belting, men of London, of Suffolk and Norfolk, of Devon and Wales and Scotland and Ireland, staring so curiously at the gawky farmers, who, having come from the same places that bred them, were now outlanders, incredible rustics. For long moments the two groups faced one another; it was a moment the redcoats were trained for, but the farmers' hands were wet on their guns.

Then Major Pitcairn, commanding the British, made up his mind, spurred to the front and roared, “Disperse!”

The farmers growled.

“God damn you bloody rebels, lay down your guns!”

It was there, hot and terrible; they were rebels. This idea that they had conceived, that they should be free men with the right to live their lives in their own way, this tenuous, dream-like idea of liberty that men of good will had played with for thousands of years had suddenly come to its brutish head on a village green in Lexington. The farmers growled and didn't lay down their arms; instead one of them fired, and in the moment of stillness after the roar of the big musket had echoed and re-echoed, a redcoat clutched at his tunic, knelt, and then rolled over on the ground.

After that, there was no order, no memory even. The redcoat files fired a volley; the farmers fired their guns singly, by twos and threes. The women screamed and came running from their houses. Children began to cry and dogs barked madly. Then the firing died away and there was no sound except the moans of the wounded and the shrill pleading of the women.

A fifth glass of beer in front of the City Tavern in Philadelphia, and the rider told how the redcoats had marched away. “They were not after Lexington, but after Concord,” he explained. “That's where the stores were.”

“They took the farmers?” someone asked.

“No, they did not take them! Do you take a mad dog? They left well enough alone and went to Concord and walked into the town and stayed there maybe four, five hours. Then they set out back with never a thing done, like their wits were addled. And when they came to the bridge, the folk was waiting for them, not a few now, but over four hundred.

“‘You dirty bastards!' the major yells, ‘you dirty peasant bastards! Clear out and back to home!'

“They didn't move,” the rider said.

“God damn you bastards, clear the bridge!” the major roared.

They were solemn and they didn't move; their jaws worked evenly; their guns crept to level and their lips tightened, yet they didn't move. And then the British attacked and hell broke loose. Cannon roared, and there was crash after crash of musketry. With bayonets fixed, the British charged the bridge, and with clubbed muskets the farmers drove them back. Yelling, screaming, cursing, praying, the Yankees forced the redcoats off the bridge back on the Concord side of the stream. But the effort couldn't be sustained; they were farmers, not soldiers, and after the first heat of rage had passed, they gave back and allowed the redcoats to re-form, cross the bridge, and resume their march toward Lexington.