Patriots (49 page)

Thomas Jefferson in 1768

PRIVATE COLLECTION

E
ARLY IN
the winter of 1776, John Adams read a new pamphlet with a provocative title. He sent a copy to Abigail Adams and predicted that its arguments would soon become common faith on the American continent. The pamphlet,
Common Sense
, had been published anonymously by a recent immigrant from England. Despite Adams’ admiration, much about the essay irritated him, not the least its phenomenal success. Already more than a hundred thousand copies had been sold, and patriots everywhere were praising it. Adams thought the author’s reliance on the Old Testament as his authority was merely ridiculous, but the extreme democratic ideas in
Common Sense
were dangerous, and Adams wrote an essay to refute them. His rebuttal led the author to call one night on Adams at his Philadelphia lodgings.

Thomas Paine was thirty-eight, two years younger than Adams, but his life had been equally eventful and considerably more raffish.
He had been raised in the Church of England, although his father, a corset-maker, was attracted to the Quakers. Thomas’ sour mother was a trial to him. When he read
The Taming of the Shrew
he concluded that she might have provided the model. He also learned as a boy that the fine gentlemen in his town of Thetford had no scruples about sending hungry children to the gallows for stealing.

As his belief in British justice eroded, the Quakers caused Thomas to question God’s divine plan with their belief that He was too good to permit His own son’s death to save other men. In time, Thomas found the Quaker outlook too gray; he preferred the world in all its gaudy colors, but he retained a sympathy for the sect. He read a natural history of Virginia and, captivated by the lushness of its southern vistas, vowed that he would cross the Atlantic to the new world one day.

In the meantime, he took a wife and a badly paid job as a tax collector. His wife died in childbirth, and after he had been barely a year on the job the government removed him when he was caught out in a common ruse among the collectors: instead of traveling through the countryside collecting taxes, they had stayed home and simply issued stamps without checking inventories or assets. Paine could find no other work, and at the age of twenty-eight he was forced to beg for his job back.

By that time, Paine had become more aggressive. He had been driven to his past offense by low wages, and now he resolved to improve the pay of all excisemen. He was already proving that he had a gift for debating. A group of friends met regularly at the White Hart tavern to drink and wrangle, and the next morning they sent a prize—an old copy of Homer in Greek that they called
the Headstrong Book—to the man who had been the most obstinate haranguer; usually the book went to Paine. The nights when Quakers joined the group, they sometimes supported his ideas: replacing war with international arbitration; rights for women; an end to slavery. Otherwise, he stood alone. Drawing on his debating practice, Paine wrote a pamphlet, “The Case of the Salary of the Officers of Excise and Thoughts on the Corruption Arising from the Poverty of Excise Officers.” In it he argued that the collectors had not received a promised pay raise because toadies of George III had convinced Parliament to increase the king’s salary by a hundred thousand pounds a year. Paine sent his essay to every
member of Parliament, where it was greeted with indifference. Months passed with no redress. Paine began to shirk his duties and was removed from his job again. The charge was absent without leave.

His second marriage was going no more smoothly. Paine’s long face was remarkable for his large and pendulous nose and the amused curve to his mouth. But what everyone remembered were his blue eyes. Men friends laughed at Paine’s confidence that any woman who looked into those eyes fell in love with him. He might have sometimes deceived himself, but he hadn’t been wrong about his landlord’s daughter, Elizabeth, who was the sort of lovely blonde Paine preferred. Afterward none of his friends knew what went wrong with the marriage, and when they asked about his wife Paine was evasive. Certainly, when they married, Elizabeth had worshiped him. But Paine claimed he had never felt love for her, only pity. Elizabeth began flirting openly with other men, while Paine spent more nights at the White Hart. They separated formally in June 1774, and she went to live with her brother. Years later, his enemies ignored his first wife’s pregnancy and spread the rumor that Paine was impotent.

Paine’s appeal to the Parliament to increase the tax collectors’ pay had opened one door to him. Oliver Goldsmith read the essay at the time he was writing
She Stoops to Conquer
, sought out its author and introduced him to his literary circle. Paine also met Benjamin Franklin, who remarked afterward on his wonderful eyes. When Paine, without job, wife or prospects, decided at the age of thirty-seven to see America, Franklin wrote a letter recommending him to his son-in-law in Philadelphia.

Paine arrived in America on the last day of November 1774, and his fortunes improved immediately. A bookseller who had just launched a magazine hired him as its editor. By the second issue, Paine could report to Franklin that he had doubled the circulation. He was learning that the ideas he had developed during the disputes at the White Hart were not widely shared in his adopted country. He wrote against cruelty to animals and cruelty to women. Man, he said, “in all climates and in all ages, has been either an insensible husband or an oppressor.”

After Paine had been in America for some time, Benjamin Franklin, now back in Philadelphia, suggested that he write a history
of the current upheaval against England. Paine took up the idea and wrote quickly in order to surprise Franklin with the result by New Year’s Day 1776. When the manuscript was finished, Paine began looking for a printer. His forceful language frightened away several, but Benjamin Rush, a delegate to the Congress, put Paine in touch with a printer named Bell, who was also a patriot.

Paine felt little nostalgia for England and none for its king. He brought a passion to his pamphlet that had been missing from the writing of even the more fervent Americans. Paine was outraged over Lexington and Concord and claimed that his own rebellion had begun on that day. “
I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever,” Paine wrote, adding that he felt disdain for “the wretch, with that pretended title of Father of His People, who can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.” Few of the leading patriots—possibly Thomas Jefferson was one—felt that strongly about George III. And yet they found something heady, liberating, in hearing him called “the Royal Brute of Britain.”

Paine’s invective was stirring, but he had loftier aims for his essay. He wanted the Congress to draw up a charter for the united colonies that would guarantee the freedom and the property of all men, along with their right to worship according to their own conscience. He urged America to build a navy for its defense and calculated how it could be financed. “No country on the globe is so happily situated, or so internally capable of raising a fleet as America. Tar, timber, iron and cordage are her natural produce. We need go abroad for nothing.” That spirit of optimism and pride coursed through Paine’s essay. He longed to see the Americans declare themselves independent for one practical reason. He knew that America needed the support of France and Spain but that neither country would send aid so long as the struggle seemed to be a family matter between England and her colonies. Without a declaration of independence, the patriots were merely rebels. What European power would jeopardize its own empire by encouraging rebellion?

Thomas Paine

HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENN SYLVANIA

Common Sense
, published in 1768

BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Paine’s document would have excited its readers under any title, but
Common Sense
was rousing. Benjamin Rush, who had taken his medical degree in Edinburgh, had suggested the plainspoken Scots title. After more than a decade of lawyerly appeals to the English constitution, here was someone urging the Americans to cut through history and tradition and rely on their intuition. Since every government’s policies were based on economics, he reduced the question to whether America would prosper better with England or without her. Once Americans saw the answer as clearly as Paine did, why should old mythologies stop them from acting in their self-interest?

But the document was winning hearts across the continent less from pragmatic argument than from its pulsing excess: “
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

When John Adams met this brash recruit to the patriot ranks, he told Paine that his sketchy ideas for a new government lacked restraints and safeguards; Adams had never been as willing as his cousin to trust to the judgments of the masses. Adams also lectured Paine for claiming that the Jews had adopted the idea of monarchy from their heathen enemies. Those remarks about the Old Testament were so foolish, Adams added, that he had to question Paine’s sincerity.

At that, Paine laughed and admitted that he had stolen his religious ideas from Milton. Paine clearly had contempt for the entire Bible, both the Old Testament and the New. Here in Philadelphia he had even lost his respect for the Quakers, because he thought their pacifism was a disguise for Tory sentiments. But when he saw that his free thinking irritated Adams, Paine backtracked and said blandly that he had decided not to publish his thoughts on religion until the latter part of his life.

The encounter ended amiably. Adams concluded that Paine was conceited but capable and a good writer. Adams was frank in a letter to his wife about his own more guarded approach to writing—“I could not have written anything in so manly and striking a style.” Because John Adams was known to favor independence and because the pamphlet had been printed anonymously, men sometimes complimented him on
Common Sense.
But Adams knew that his own blueprint for the future was more clear-sighted. He told Abigail Adams that Paine was “
a better hand in pulling down than building.”

Paine’s daring provoked an unprecedented response. By April, letters from Virginia convinced George Washington that a tide had turned. “I find
Common Sense
is working a powerful change in the minds of many men,” he wrote. Thomas Jefferson, who had left Philadelphia and returned to his estate, Monticello, received a copy from a delegate, Thomas Nelson, who said he was offering a present of two shillings’ worth of Common Sense. Conservative members of the Congress were still arguing against severing ties with England, but Thomas Paine’s call resounded above all of them: “
The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘Tis time to part.”