The Trouble with Tom (3 page)

Well. . . it was an unusual request, you see—he'd go to the burial committee and see what they thought, of course, and. . .well, and. . . Had he changed opinions, perhaps, since writing
The Age of Reason?

No, Paine said.

Willet would see what he could do. He, of all people, knew just how fraught Paine's modest request was. The local Quaker assemblies were already shaking themselves to pieces: a schism had been opening up between Orthodox members and a liberal faction headed by Willet's cousin, Elias Hicks. These arguments eventually became so heated that at one assembly the two sides wrestled over the property of the meetinghouse and tore a desk in half. Critics tarred Hicksites as closet Deists, and leagued them with the vilified author of
The Age of Reason;
one pamphlet charged Hicks with plagiarizing Paine. In many ways
The Age Reason
did indeed seem like an especially blunt statement of the most liberal form of modern Quakerism—but Hicks vociferously denied the resemblance. And even if he did see any, it would be deeply impolitic to admit it.

Some days later Willet came back with the burial committee's answer, informing Paine as delicately as he could that . . . well, their answer was not
yes.
His old sect had forsaken him, and now he had nowhere else to go. The trembling old man felt himself dissolving in despair over the world's indifference to his fate.

I wish to die,
he'd tell his landlord, who now sometimes found his boarder weeping.
I see no other end
to
my sufferings.

"One seventy-nine," the clerk intones flatly.

I count the change out and leave. There's nothing left here: the Herring Street house survived long after they'd changed the name to Bleecker, and even after Seventh Avenue cut through part of the old block, but it was demolished in the 1930s. Nothing special: just one more building that had housed a sick old man once, same as every other building in New York.

Paine grew more feeble and helpless here, with gout, strokes, and abscesses battering his health until his landlord could hardly care for him anymore. His failing body was borne a block away to a friendly Democratic household, the Grove Street home of Aaron Burr's old law partner. His new neighbor Amasa Woodworth would stop by every day to check in on Paine, and he made for welcome company, since he was an engineer involved in the invention of a new oscillating steam engine design. It was a topic that held endless fascination for Paine, for steam engines had always appealed to his sense of progress—why, back in the day, he'd discussed steam engine design improvements with James Watt himself. Amasa began keeping Paine company late into the night too, for though the old man was not afraid of dying, he did dread dying alone.

Word trickled out from the sickroom that spring: it was true, Paine really was in his final days. A quiet procession of old friends came by to see Paine, to pay their respects. They found a man so weakened he could barely sit up, and who could not keep down weak milk punch without vomiting it up again. Even Jarvis, now at the top of his game as an artist, took time off from working in his grand studio at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway to visit his old friend. Gladdened by the sight of the dashing painter, Paine would turn over onto his side—gasping
"Oh! God.! Oh. . . God."
as he rolled upon his sores—and then, regaining his composure, confide in Jarvis. He had been getting harassed constantly by people trying to convert him, he said: ministers were stopping by every day now, angling for a recantation. Even the nurse, Mrs. Heddon, would wait until he was helpless with pain and then pounce upon him with the Bible and Hobart's
Companion for the Altar
.

I recant
nothing
, he told Jarvis.

The next morning, warned by his physician Dr. Manley—
you are about to die, dissolution is upon you this very dary
—Paine refused yet again to accept Christ. The doctor pressed him one last time.

"Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" he demanded.

There was a long pause of minutes. Perhaps the patient really had died. But Paine's lips moved: words, weak but distinct.

"I have no wish to believe on that subject."

And then . . .

Then . . .

He should have been dead from the start. He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain-he'd not yet added the final e to his name—set out for London and was recruited at dockside for service on a privateer ship called the
Terrible
, commanded by one Captain Death. Thomas's father showed up on the docks in time to save him from what was either a very good allegory or a very bad Ingmar Bergman film. The
Terrible
sailed without Pain, and Captain Death and the crew were slaughtered. And there is something curiously familiar in that account, isn't there? For we all nearly board a
Terrible
we all look back in relief that we did not. We always slip free of Captain Death one more time . . . until, of course, we don't.

He should have been dead halfway into his life. It was in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774, that the
London
Packet disgorged a nondescript passenger half-dead with typhoid. Pain was by then a middle-aged failure: the son of a Quaker family of corsetmakers in Thetford had left England a disgraced customs officer and a bankrupt shopkeeper. He was recently divorced from his second wife, having already lost his first wife and only child in childbirth. And after watching five other dead passengers dumped over the ship's side on the way over, it's a wonder Pain didn't throw himself overboard as well. But among his meager belongings was found a letter to Richard Bache, a prominent local merchant:

The bearer Mr. Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, of all of which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.

It proved to be the best introduction to Philadelphia one could imagine, for Bache's "affectionate father" was in fact a stepfather with a different name altogether, a gentleman scientist and merchant who had noticed Pain's argumentative and restless brilliance in London coffeehouses: “
Benj. Franklin
” read the signature.

How many times must progress be born, struck dead, and reborn again, before it finally survives? It was, after all, not the first time Franklin had been intrigued by the fiery zeal of a fellow Quaker. Decades earlier he'd befriended Benjamin Lay, a hunchbacked glovemaker disowned by English Quakers for denouncing slavery and capital punishment as abominations. Exiled to Philadelphia and dismayed to find slaveowning there too, he'd quit town in disgust and lived as a hermit in a cave outside the city limits, refusing to wear or eat anything that had involved the suffering of an animal. Quaker slaveholders probably fancied themselves rid of him. They were not: attired in a biblical beard and a flowing white overcoat, Lay would sweep into Philadelphia meetinghouses to scourge the Friends throughout the 1750s.
"In the sight of God, you are as guilty
as
if you stabbed your slaves
to
the heart!"
roared the furious elder who materialized in the midst of one meeting, wielded a knife on himself, and showered bystanders with fake blood. For his troubles, Lay was physically thrown into the gutter on Market Street. He refused to pick himself up from the muck, preferring to lie there as a reproach to the Friends as they left the meetinghouse. But he still entertained one occasional visitor in his cave-Franklin.

And perhaps it was that same idealistic quality that the now-elderly Franklin saw in the unemployed fellow who held forth in London coffeehouses. Absurdly, this newest protege simply had a notion of going to Philadelphia to start a young ladies' finishing school. Ah, but then Franklin himself had once nearly thrown it all over to become a London swimming instructor. Pain, too, was marked out for greater things-he just did not know what yet. After a job at a local newspaper, where he reinvented himself by changing his name slightly and penning editorials that excoriated the very same inequalities Lay once had, Paine finally found his life's mission in writing a pamphlet.

The
pamphlet.

In the will he'd scrawled in Ryder's house on Herring Street, Paine carefully included instructions for his tombstone, a simple headstone with his name, his dates, and an epitaph of just four words:
Author of Common Sense.
A single pamphlet, written when he was a nobody, published anonymously; of the thousands of pages he had published in his life, for all the tumult and agony he had undergone, it all came back to that one act.
Understand this and you
understand my life.

Why? True,
Common Sense
sold one hundred and twenty thousand copies in its first three months after January 10, 1776-and upwards of five hundred thousand copies in the next three years. In those days of expensive paper, each copy was passed around. America's population was only about 2.5 million, many of whom could not even read, so readership of this pamphlet was virtually universal among the literate. It was a feat unequaled by any document in the Colonies save perhaps the Bible. It brought forth a frenzied response by Loyalist propagandists, desperate to stanch the wounds he'd made, but it was already too late. Paine had changed the very terms of the debate. 'Without the pen of the author of
Common Sense,"
John Adams later mused, "the word of Washington would have been raised in vain." This was no small admission coming from Adams, since he'd initially condemned
Common Sense
as "a poor ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass."

But . . . Who cares now? Why should this still matter, this tax and sovereignty polemic from centuries ago?Lots of political writers have written lots of bestsellers, and a few have even managed to tear the nation from its moorings. Yet we do not still read Rowan Hinton Helper's
Impending Crisis of the South.
So why this one: what made it special? Why make this one pamphlet the epitaph on his grave? Perhaps the clue lies in plain sight. Though
Common Sense
was a forty-six-page pamphlet, its animating spirit may be found within its first sentence: "A long habit of not thinking a thing
wrong,
gives it a superficial appearance of being right." Forget what you thought was wrong, Paine says, and forget what you thought was right: produce proof that they are so. And if there is one word that expresses what the achievements of the Enlightenment are about, it is that one.
Proof:

Reader, just for the moment, let us assume that as you hold this book open with one hand, you are holding a piece of ivory in the other. It is two feet long, and the thickness of a man's thumb. Now, if you were to make this piece of ivory descend with great force upon the head of your closest neighbor, they would inform you that it is an item possessing great hardness. Yet, were you to rest this ivory rod between two chairs, and then sit upon it, you would find it possessed a surprising flexibility. One might have assumed that as this item is hard, it was therefore not flexible. Its hardness, although not actually opposed to flexibility, seems incompatible at first glance. This is what
second
glances are for: an assertion demands proof through actual observation, rather than mere assumptions.

Writing in his book
Elements of Logick
in
1748,
the Scottish logician William Duncan explains:

Ivory for instance is hard and elastic; this we know by experience, and indeed by that alone. For being altogether strangers to the true nature both of elasticity and hardness, we cannot by the bare contemplation of our ideas determine, how far the one necessarily implies the other, or whether there may be a repugnance between them. But when we observe them to exist both in the same object, we are then assured from experience, that they are not incompatible.

Elements of Logick
was the boning knife of the Scottish Enlightenment: it sliced argumentation clean of bloated classical artifice, tearing away its Latinate fat to reveal a Greek skeleton of Euclidian logic. Duncan wielded self-evident propositions and a geometrical progression of proofs and assertions to build arguments: his was the elevation of mathematical logic to rhetoric.
Elements
of
Logick
influenced revolutionary intellectuals and scientists alike—and when you realize that to be the former was also often to be the latter, you begin to understand the era of Franklin and Paine. When their fellow rationalist Jefferson fatefully claimed that "we hold these truths to be self-evident," he was laying out the destiny of his continent as a mathematical statement.

But then there is that problem with our ivory rod. Certain truths are
not
self-evident: that is why they must be examined and spelled out. They are
not
common sense. And that is why
Common Sense
itself, weirdly enough, is not
common sense
at all. This strange little book, so often cited as a model of plainspoken clarity, is something altogether more subtle. Only its language is straightforward: its form and aims are not.
Common Sense
is in fact at least three separate arguments, none of which many Americans in 1776 would have been inclined to entirely agree with. Yet Paine makes one argument imperceptibly slide into the next, like the telescoping segments of a collapsible spyglass. By the time you realize what he's doing, he's already folded you up and put you in his pocket.

Paine begins with his most outrageous implication:
all kings are illegitimate
. He does this by denying that most precious possession of monarchs, their noble bloodlines. "Could we take off the dark covering of antiquity," Common Sense dryly notes, "and trace them to their first rise . . . we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang." Granted, a loyal subject may say, perhaps that's true; in fact, it has to be true for Shakespeare's history plays to work. But an unsavory past does not always dictate reform in the present. It would not be very practical. The great benefit of kings in the present, one might think, is that no matter how compromised the monarchy's origins are, they have become a safe and predictable form of government.