Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

dignity of hope and intelligence. In the attic which the Scotsman had given him for an office, he sat and labored, in the beginning from dawn through to midnight. He had never been an editor; he had to learn typography, spelling, punctuation; he read the colonial magazines until his eyes ached to get the style, the taste, and, most of all, the political and economic feel of the colonies.
    He shed his Britishness as a duck sheds water. He had no time to travel now, but in the taverns and coffee houses, he buttonholed everyone who had been to the far-off countries, or who lived there and was passing through Philadelphia: New Yorkers, Vermont men, Virginians, men from the Deep South, Carolina, Georgia, drawling backwoodsmen, boatmen from the Ohio, soft-voiced Creoles from New Orleans, rangers who had crossed over the mountains into the wild cane-brake of Kentucky, leathery-skinned fishermen from Maine.
    Philadelphia was the place for that, and if you waited long enough the whole of America passed along Broad Street. Paine pumped them, and for the first time in his life he found many men, men from every walk of life, who treated him with respect.
    Out of this, out of the town itself, out of Aitken, out of the things he read, he was beginning to form a picture of America—a picture detailed by the fringe of tidewater colonization. Here was a land of no one people, of no one prejudice, of no one thought, a country so big that all England could be tucked away in a corner and forgotten, a country so youthful that half the people one met were foreigners or the first generation of foreigners, a country so inevitable that it was calmly, even lazily, stirring itself to revolt against the greatest power on earth.
    It was the inevitability of America that stirred him most; here was a new breed of men, not out of blood nor class nor birth, but out of a promise pure and simple; and the promise when summed up, when whittled down, when made positive and negative, shorn of all the great frame of mountains, rivers, and valleys, was freedom, and no more and no less than that.
    He was not blind; he had been in the rat cage too long to ever be blinded, and he saw the bad with the good. It was flung in his face, for directly across the street from the print shop in which he worked was the chief public slave market of Philadelphia. There was brought the run of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Jersey human merchandise, the black to be sold body and soul and forever, the white to be auctioned off for bond, for debt, for punishment. Morning and afternoon, the auctioneer would be singing out: “Here’s a buck, here’s a buck, here’s a choice fat black buck, strong as iron, ripe as an apple, as full of juice as a rip-snorting stallion, feel him, come in back, gentlemen, come in back and see his virility, he’s been whipped fine, he’s been broken and trained—” Oh, it was the city of brotherly love, all right, but who ever went through it without stopping for an hour at the slave mart?
    The open shed where the selling took place fronted on the swank London Coffee House where the young fops, gotten out in laces and ribbons and silks and satins, a credible imitation of the bloods and macaronis in the old country, sipped their drinks and enjoyed the show.
    And there was not only the slave market; there were the stocks, the whipping posts, the gallows, the incredibly foul jails where debtors and murderers, men, women, and children were thrown together in a tight pen of death and disease.
    There was the bad with the good in Philadelphia, but there was no rat cage. If a man had guts or brains—or a little of each, he made his own way. Look at Franklin!
    But Aitken would say, when Paine paused at his work to stare at the shed across the road, “Keep a tight lip, Thomas, that be no part a yer business.”
    Sometimes Paine wondered what was his business.
    â€œYe’ll no’ be writing slavery in the magazine,”