Citizen Tom Paine (10 page)

“Poverty is a degree of things,” Jefferson said. “I have seen people here in America whose poverty was complete and absolute, yet they retained—”

“Dignity,” Paine said.

“Dignity.”

“Then that's all we live for,” Paine reflected. “If there's any meaning in human life, then it's there, in the dignity of a human being.”

“I think so.”

“I never realized that before; I began to feel it here, but I didn't know until I spoke of it tonight. It's true though; all through ten thousand years men have been corrupted by having their dignity taken from them. When my wife died and the neighbors poured in to look at her poor, tired body, the little, evil thrill of it the only excitement in their lives, each bringing a scrap of food for admission, I could think, God help me, only of how comical it was. If we were made in the image of God, how rotten that image has become!”

Another time, Jefferson was giving a small dinner for George Washington and he asked Paine to come. Randolph was to be there, too, and at first Paine refused; he was frightened; he valued his relationship with Jefferson too much, and he was afraid he would make a fool of himself in front of the three Virginians whose culture, quality, and wealth were almost beyond his imagination. He had heard of Mount Vernon, Washington living there like a great feudal baron, with packs of hunting dogs, strings of horses, countless black slaves, rivers of wine, the “quality” coming and going endlessly, a coach that had cost two thousand pounds; he had heard of the Randolphs; certain Quakers of Philadelphia never tired telling tales of these three godless agnostics, and Paine had little basis upon which to separate the true from the false. What meaning for him or for any common man could a rebellion have if their kind were at the bottom of it? Wasn't it all a clever cover for their desire to be freed from the dictatorship of the British tobacco agents, and weren't they, as all their class, ruthless enough to spill a hundred thousand quarts of blood to see their great plantations thrive?

But at last he gave in to Jefferson's urging, forswore himself to sullen silence, put on his best suit, his best wig, and came to the dinner. He was surprised at how eagerly they shook hands with him; they knew of him; they read the Pennsylvania Magazine, even Washington who, Paine had presumed, read nothing at all. Peyton Randolph, the eldest of the three, had an eager, inquiring air, as if he had looked forward to nothing so much as meeting Paine. Washington said little; he sat and listened with his chin on his hand when he wasn't eating, his long face intent upon what was being said, his brow furrowed with a shade of annoyance now and again, perhaps most of it an impatience with his own lack of understanding. Jefferson took up the conversation and did most of the talking. Paine noticed that of the four, Washington drank the most and seemed least affected by what he drank.

Jefferson toyed with the idea of independence; as an intellectual concept it appealed to him, for it was filled with limitless and entrancing possibilities, but his manner of treating it was entirely objective, and Paine saw that he never considered it as any more than a dream. When he made a simile of a child being forced out of a house by his father, the child in this case being the colonies and the father England, Washington smiled, showing his bad teeth and said, “But he remains in the family.”

“Only by name.”

“Yet we are Englishmen, Virginians true enough, but Englishmen nevertheless,” nodding generously at Paine, their provincialism polite as it was narrow.

“Oh, damn it, we're at war,” Randolph said impatiently. “Why don't people realize that?”

“For our rights.”

“Rights! Rights! What are rights? Where do they begin and end?”

Jefferson laughed and said, “What do you think of rights, Mr. Paine?”

“I think there are no such things. I think that by right of birth all things belong to all men. You can take away rights, but you can't give what belongs to all.”

“You make no exceptions, Mr. Paine?” Randolph asked.

“None!”

“Then you would reform England as well as America?”

“It's not reform for men to claim what is theirs.”

“But it's dangerous. You sound bloodthirsty, Mr. Paine.”

“I hate war,” Paine said slowly. “Of all ways to hold man in contempt and make a beast of him, war is the worst. There is nothing on earth I hate more than war.”

Paine wasn't surprised when the Congress made Washington commander in chief of the rabble of Yankee farmers who lay like hungry wolves around Boston. There was something about the tall, dry-faced Virginian that made people trust him. “As they always trust stupidity,” the Philadelphia wits said. But Paine wasn't certain of that, and on the day when Washington rode through the streets, cheered wildly, Paine stood in the crowd and tried to understand what dull, curious force in the man could draw out the admiration of these shouting fools.

Although a state of actual war was beginning to exist that summer of 1775, the people of Philadelphia could not take it quite seriously. For one thing, Massachusetts was so far away; for another, business was good. Even when news came to town that there had been a terrible, bloody battle fought in Boston, at a place called Breed's Hill, and that the redcoat dead lay like pigs in a slaughtering pen, it did not seem quite real to Philadelphia. After their first rush of enthusiasm, the militia enlistments fell off sharply; the wags did caricatures of the citizen soldiers. The drills became sloppy affairs; the men came to resent their officers, and the whole scheme of a citizen army showed signs of going to pieces.

For Paine, those early summer days were leisurely and almost carefree. He had money enough for the first time in his life; his lodgings cost little, and a few shillings a day more than provided for him. His reputation with the magazine gave him enough of a name for him to sell an article here and there, and his reaction from the restrictions laid down on him by Aitken was to write quickly, purposefully, and better than ever before. He read a good deal, talked a good deal, and took to long, rambling walks along the river front. The Pennsylvania countryside, so like yet so different from England, fascinated him, and he would wander out into the hills, put up for the night at the stone house of some Dutch farmer, smoke a pipe, drink good homemade beer, and argue about everything from crops to government. With working-men he was able to drop the chip from his shoulder, and he, to whom good speech came with such difficulty, lapsed with ease into the broad Pennsylvania country drawl.

One day, hot and tired, he climbed over a stile into a farmyard where a buxom, fair-haired girl of twenty or twenty-one was drawing the buttermilk off her churn. “Could I have some?” Paine asked, and she poured some into a wooden mug and laughed at the way it ran from the corners of his mouth.

“Ah, you're a dry one,” she said.

“Can I pay you?”

She laughed again and asked him whether he had come up out of Philadelphia.

“All the way,” he said proudly. It was a good twelve miles, and only here in America had he learned the deep pleasure of walking.

“You don't look like a walker.”

“No—”

“What do you do?”

He told her he was a writer, and she smiled at him quizzically, as if a writer were the strangest thing that had ever come her way. Then, as easily and inoffensively as she had made his acquaintance, she dropped it and went back to her butter-making as if he had never existed, running off the milk and lifting the rich white butter out of the churn, molding it like clay in her strong freckled hands. Paine, comfortable, quite rested now, sprawled in the shade of a tree, entranced by the wonderful pattern the sun and the leaves made on his dusty clothes, stretched out his legs, drank his milk, and watched her beat the butter on the board. The farm was evidently a prosperous one, the fieldstone house square and solid as a fortress, the barn half stone, half timber, strong hand-hewn beams jutting from under the eaves. They had had their first haying, and the sweet-smelling stuff was piled in great heaps out on the fields and, beyond, the corn and oats were coming up as if they could not hasten from the earth soon enough. There was a pen full of rooting black and whites, and the chickens ran loose and aimless. Out in the fields, a half mile or so away, two men were working a team, and a fat pile of smoke ran from the chimney to show that things were doing inside.

When the girl had finished her butter, she lifted the board in her arms and said to Paine over her shoulder, “You may come in if you wish.” Her recollection of his presence was so casual and good-natured that he couldn't help but follow her, and they went into a long, low-ceilinged kitchen where another woman, evidently the girl's mother, was mixing a batter of dough.

At one side of the kitchen, there was a great hearth, full eight feet long, with a Dutch oven on either end. The floor of the kitchen was red brick, swept so clean you could eat off it, and down die center was a long sawbuck table. Two handmade benches flanked the fireplace; there was a wide sideboard, loaded to the shaking point with pewter and crockery. Those and several straight chairs made up the furnishings of the room, but from the ceiling hung smokings of ham and bacon and jerked venison and beef. And from one of the benches four tow-headed children, three boys and a girl, regarded Paine with a wide-eyed but reticent curiosity.

The girl said, “Mother, this here's a writing man, walked up out of Philadelphia.”

Paine bowed and said, “My name is Thomas Paine, madam. I was hot and thirsty, and your daughter was good enough to give me a glass of buttermilk.”

“We have plenty of that,” the woman smiled, not leaving her work. She was past middle age, but broad-shouldered and strong, her sleeves rolled up, her large arms white with powder past the elbows. Her face, lined with work, was pleasant in its big, regular features. “Our name's Rumpel,” she said. “That's Sarah.” She pointed to the boys and called off, “Ephraim, Gideon, Samuel.” The little girl was Rachel. Then she went on with her work, and Paine sat down in a cool corner.

At noon, the long table was set. The farmer, Jacob Rumpel, clumped in with his hired man, shook hands with Paine, and sat down at the table. Without words, they had made it evident that he would stay and eat, and he had no desire to leave. Sarah set a place for him next to her father; when she looked at him there was a twinkle in her eyes, and now and again Paine had a feeling she was laughing at him. The children raced to the board, never taking their eyes off Paine, and the farmer, who had been turning the name over in his mind, said finally, “You be with that Pennsylvania Magazine.”

Paine nodded, somewhat pleased that they should know him here.

“I don't hold with it!” Jacob snapped.

“Neither do I.”

“Then why are you not man enough to throw down your pen?”

“Father,” Sarah said, “your food will be cold.”

“I did.”

“Ah—”

“That's why I can walk in the country,” Paine smiled.

Turning to him suddenly, the farmer demanded, “Were you thrown out or did you quit them?”

“Some of each.”

“I know Aitken, a tight man with a rope around his soul. He waves this way and that but lacks the guts to fall. Paine, there's good men in writing and bad. I read Ben Franklin and Jim Hall. I read MacCullough and Tom Jefferson. I like a man with gall. I like a man—”

“Pay no attention to father,” Sarah said quietly.

“—who can look at a thing and say right or wrong. Right is right and wrong is wrong. I don't hold with in-between. I reckon I side with the Boston men, what's mine is mine so long as I got powder for my gun—” He Was a tall, lean, brown-faced man, with a bobbing apple in his throat and tiny blue eyes.

“Go an' eat, Jacob,” his wife said.

For Paine, the Rumpels were a new and wonderful experience. There was nothing like them in England, and he was sure there was nothing quite like them anywhere else in the world. In wealth and possessions they were richer than many a squire at home, yet Jacob Rumpel worked with his hands and Hester Rumpel, his wife, did the cooking for the whole huge family. They were not peasants, yet they could not be put in the class of the English yeomen farmers. Their hired man sat down with them at the table as an equal, not as a servant, and the children shared in the chores as if they took pleasure in the mere act of labor.

Jacob Rumpel plowed his own fields, yet at night he read not only the Pennsylvania Magazine but Voltaire and Defoe. His wit was the wit of Poor Richard; Ben Franklin was his god and the greatest intellectual influence upon his life; and he could only philosophize in terms of action. He made his own candles, his own soap, his own cloth for which he raised his own flax and wool. The farm was his, but a younger brother had packed his possessions in a wagon and gone west into the lonely hills of Fincastle, and Rumpel took it for granted that some of his sons would do the same. His wife came of Puritan stock, but he himself was comfortably agnostic, not out of reason, but rather out of unbounded confidence in things that are. He and God walked the earth on even terms; he did what was right, and he was content with his doubts. He hated slave-holders, and he drank no tea out of principle, but his admiration for the Boston men, whom he considered in other ways a bloodless and intolerant breed, would not be translated into action until the redcoats marched on Pennsylvania soil. When Paine asked him what he would do then, he said, matter of factly, “Take my gun.”

“And the farm?”

“I reckon the farm'll limp along.”

But after he had gone back to the farm half a dozen times, welcomed by Rumpel who was just naive enough to consider Paine a great figure in the intellectual life of Philadelphia, a favorite with the children to whom he told endless stories of highwaymen and privateers, Paine no longer denied to himself what brought him there so constantly. He was not in love with Sarah, not as love goes; inside he was dry and empty, and the memory of the serving girl who died in the shack in Margate hung like a stone around his neck.