Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

die Scotsman said. “There’s slaver and non-slaver pay their shilling. Ye’ll no’ be writing rift and rebellion and incite to riot. I hold no brief for the fat king in London, but his way is a way of peace and prosperity, and I dinna hold with them that scream so loud for liberty.” Aitken was never quite sure what lay behind Paine’s rough, hook-nosed face, his twisted eyes that seemed to be turned inward more than outward. The magazine which had started off as a venture was rapidly becoming a success, six hundred for the first issue, fifteen hundred for the second—and, at a shilling a copy, Aitken could see a fortune just over the horizon.
    â€œI have a debt to you,” Paine murmured. “But the magazine is my making. Remember that.”
    â€œAnd yer my making, remember that,” Aitken said. “Ye were a dirty wretch when I picked you up. Show yer ingratitude to others, not to me.”
    A few months before Tom Paine arrived in America, a number of men on horseback had converged toward this same town of Philadelphia. They came from a good many of the countries that made up the fringe of settlements, and some were rich and some were poor; some were brilliant and some not so brilliant, and some were known in their day and others long afterward. There were the two cousins from Massachusetts, Sam and John Adams, Cushing from the same state, strange and burning those Yankee men were, Randolph from Virginia, Patrick Henry also from Virginia—and a big, quiet planter from the Potomac country—his name was Washington—Middleton from the Deep South, and many more, dandies, tradesmen, farmers, hunters, and philosophers.
    In Philadelphia they roamed all over the streets, mainly because many of them had never seen a good-sized city before; they ate too much, drank too much, talked too much. They called themselves the Continental Congress. They had a long list of grievances against the British way of government, taxes in which they had no say, repression of trade, heavy duties, import monopolies held by Britain, restrictions on manufacture, redcoat troops quartered on colonists, encouragement for the Indians on the frontier to kill and loot–but with all those grievances, they didn’t know what to do and hadn’t thought too deeply about what they could do.
    Not only that, but among themselves, they were strangers. The Yankees didn’t like slavery and made no bones about it, and the Tidewater and Deep South people didn’t like Yankees and made no bones about that either. Sam Adams, the rabble rouser from Boston, whom many of them thought just a wee bit mad, ventured to talk of complete independence; he was shut up and marked down for a fool and a dangerous fanatic. But he captured the imagination of a rawboned, bespectacled Virginian, Patrick Henry by name, who roared out, “By God, I am not a Virginian; I’m American!” Then, while the Congress was in session, Massachusetts reared up back at home and declared her independence from British authority. Paul Revere rode down from Boston to Philadelphia with the news, and the Congress wrote a Declaration of Rights. Then the bleak, terrible prospect of what they had done broke on them.
    â€œIf 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