Thomas Paine more than any other man inspired the leaders and
the people of America to seek independence rather than
just representation in the British parliament.

He was a common man that worked behind the scenes. He
labored day and night, writing, typesetting, printing,
and distributing pamphlets containing his
thoughts about what a great nation
America could be.

Paine was born January 29th 1737 in Thetford, England.
His father was a Quaker... his mother a protestant.
He became neither, he was a stanch freethinker.

Thomas Paine hated slavery and truly believed that all men
were created equal. He believed that Almighty God was
the creator and sustainer of all things and
that man's Soul had eternal life.

By the time Paine was 37 he had failed ten times in business
and employment in England. In September
of 1774 Paine immigrated to America.

In Philadelphia Paine tried his hand at journalism with
moderate success. Later he wrote Common Sense
which was published in January of 1776 and
was an instant bestseller throughout
the colonies.

Thomas Paine became the spokesman of the American Revolution.
He wrote article after article entitled, Crisis, between 1776 and
1783 which inspired the men fighting the British army.

Paine openly condemned and exposed those: common traders,
aristocrats and congressional representatives alike, that
tried to make an inflated profit off of war materials.

More than any other man of his time, Thomas Paine, inspired the
common man and the colonial leaders alike to seek freedom.
It is a national disgrace that his tremendous contribution
is overlooked by historians because of his
unequaled honesty and outspoken
religious convictions.

Thomas Paine was the creator of the phrase,"United States of America."

The following are excerpts from:

CITIZEN TOM PAINE

"The Violent and Passionate Story of America's Revolution
and the Man Whose Words forged a Nation."
(A Historical Fiction Novel)
by
HOWARD FAST

"This is a new thing here," Paine said. "That's why no one knows what to do."

"When the time comes to fight, we'll know what to do," Captain Lee insisted, giving stubborn emphasis to a theme he had repeated over and over."

"No, we have to know what to do first. It's no use to fight if you don't know what you're fighting for. Even if you win, it's no good."

"And I think," Perez put in, "that if you know what you're fighting for, it doesn't make too much difference if you win or lose."

"You don't lose," Paine said heatedly. "This is like no other thing the world has seen; it's new; it's a beginning, and it has to be explained. We have something here, and yet we haven't got it, and suppose we lose it and it slips through our fingers?"

"Then we're as well off," Bent grinned.

"Are we? You don't know; you're American! I came from back there!"

"What does that mean?" Benton demanded. "You shook the king's hand?"

"I didn't even spit in his face," Paine said sourly.

"That kind of talk is still treason."

"Is it? Treason's a word for a lot of things."

"Easy, easy," the smith said.

"I go easy," Paine said. "Believe me, I hate no man for what he is, not even that fat German bastard, George the Third. But I've seen man nailed to a cross, nailed there for God knows how many thousands of years, nailed with lies, oppression, gunpowder, swords."

"Now someone puts an ax in my hand, and I have a chance to help cut down that cross. I don't pass that chance by. "Paine's voice was loud; his words rang out, and by the time he had finished speaking, half the men in the coffee house were gathered about the table.

Someone put in, "Is it Independence you're talking?"

"Independence is a word."

"You seem almighty fond of words."

"And not afraid of them!" Paine roared. "I come into a land of free men and find them afraid of the one word that would bind their freedom! This is a land of promise, and there is no other on earth!"

Jefferson would not call attention to Paine's poverty, failings in matters of dress; Jefferson was in the process adoring the common man, and being only thirty two he still young enough to attach reality to his conception.

Himself the immaculate aristocrat, it astonished him... though shouldn't have... to find that Paine arrived at much the, conclusions out of experience that he, Jefferson, had gathered out of philosophy and reading.

But whereas Jefferson had dreamed enough democracy to make it real, he could never quite grasp the concept of revolution. For Paine it was the other way around, and his thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's ever could be.

Listening to Paine read something of what he had written, Jefferson wondered whether Paine knew what devils he was loosing upon the quiet eighteenth century world wherein they lived.

Paine read hoarsely and self consciously, ashamed before Jefferson:

"The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province or a Kingdom; but of a continent... at least one eighth part of the habitable globe."

"Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now."

"Now is the seed time of Continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters. . . "

There was no style; it came forth as raucously as the preaching of a Methodist minister, and it struck with frantic hammer blows. A man could memorize words like those and drive his plow or hammer to the rhythm...

" 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."

Jefferson didn't smile; a working man who cribbed from the Bible all he knew of style, who in the terms of a backwoods preacher roared a new creed for mankind, never-the-less said something no one else dared to say outright.

"What are you going to call it?" Jefferson asked.

" I think, Common Sense. That's all it is."

He was no longer Tom Paine; suddenly and curiously, he had become "Common Sense." He had written a little book, a hope or a suggestion; he was a stranger in a tidewater colony that had defied the world. He was nobody, yet out of that he became everybody, for he had seen, with the candid eyes of a peasant, the hope of mankind.

Yet they never knew what to do. The farmers stood at Concord and Lexington. The militia roved through the forest to the backwoods posts and ripped them from their small British garrisons. New York and Philadelphia belonged to the radicals, although they had been driven, cursing, fighting, bleeding from Boston.

It was much as if a wave of sudden, furious fire had burned through America, brightly at first, then with less intensity, then just a simmer of revolt that promised to die. Now he was Common Sense.

"Revolution, Paine, is a technique which we must learn with no history. We are the first, and that's why we blunder so. We have no precedent, but only a theory, and that theory is that strength lies in the hands of the armed masses."

"I am not speaking of ideals, of right and wrong, of good and bad, not even of a morality, for in the last analysis all those things are catch words and the only implement is strength."

Paine nodded. Slowly and painfully, he had been coming around to the same point of view. "The strength was always with the people," he said.

"Of course... firearms don't change that. But there never, in this world, a technique for revolution. There was a technique for tyranny and strength implemented it, always the strength of a few."

"The strength of many is revolution, but curiously enough mankind has gone through several thousand years of slavery without realizing that fact.The little men have pleaded, but when before have stood up with arms in their hands and said, This is mine!"

"There were never the circumstances before."

" Perhaps. It's true that we have here a nation of armed men who know how to use their arms; we have a Protestant tradition of discussion as opposed to autocracy; we have some notion of the dignity of man; and above all we have land, land enough for everyone."

"Those are fortunate circumstances, but now we must learn technique. The man with the iron glove has held this world for God knows how many thousands of years, and in how short a time do you suppose we can take it back from him... not to mention holding it?"

"I don't like to think about that."

"You must. We are learning a bloody, dreadful business, this technique of revolution, but we must learn it well. You wrote a little book, and because of that men will know why they fight. You wanted independence, and we're going to have it, mark my word."

"Six months ago you were rolled in the dirt because people knew what you were writing; two weeks ago a man in New York was almost tarred and feathered because he planned to publish an answer to Common Sense."

"That's not morality; that's strength, the same kind of strength the tyrants used, only a thousand times more powerful. Now we must learn how to use that strength, how to control it. We need leaders, a program, a purpose, but above all we need revolutionists."

Paine nodded.

"What are you going to do?"

"Join Washington," Paine said.

General Nathanael Greene, the handsome young Quaker in command of Fort Lee, believed that both points, facing each other across the Hudson River, could be held as long as was necessary. Rightly enough, he considered them a gate to the Hudson, and the Hudson a gate to the colonies. Now, at Fort Lee, he was informed that a man had arrived in camp who called himself Tom Paine.

"Paine?" Greene asked. He had a book, a small Bible called Common Sense, worn to pieces with two dozen readings. "Well, bring him here. Paine, you say? Of course, bring him here."

"I know you and I don't know you," Greene said to Paine when they stood face to face, the one tall, sunburned, hand some and dapper in his buff and blue which he had had made in the style of his commander's Virginia militia uniform, the other broad and stocky, hook-nosed, hair in a knot and cheeks with three days' beard, his old clothes stained with dirt and blood. "You're Common Sense, aren't you?"

Paine nodded, and they shook hands. Greene, excited as a boy, called over his aides, introduced them, ran into tent and brought out his own battered copy of Paine's book, ruffled the pages, smiling and trying to believe his eyes that Paine was here in front of him.

"You don't understand, of course—you don't know what this has meant to us. Everything, do you believe me?"

"I want to."

"Good. You know we've been beaten, no use trying to hide that. We were driven out of Brooklyn and we were driven out of New York. All we hold in Manhattan is the fort, yet we have hopes of getting it all back, not military hopes entirely, but here, what you've given us, something to chew on and bite into, something solid and substantial that they can't take away from us."

I've bought seventy five copies myself and forced men to read them who have never opened a book in their lives... "

Paine shook his head dazedly.

"And now you're here. That's the wonder of it, your being here. I swear, sir, I'd rather have you than a regiment, and the general will say the same thing when he meets you."

"Back in Philadelphia, Rush told me that revolution is a technique. What do we know about that technique, Paine asked?"

" Nothing..."

" And yet I can't get used to the idea that the cause is doomed. Do you think it's doomed?"

Greene said no, but not with assurance.

" No, of course,... it's not doomed." Paine shook his head and rubbed his heavy fingers into his brow.

"Revolution is something new, we don't know how new it is. I sometimes think that April last year a new era for the world began."

He asked Greene how long it would be, how many years, and Greene said he didn't know, it might be twenty or a hundred years. They smiled at each other, Greene showing his large strong teeth, his blue eyes wrinkled in appreciation of the parts they both played in this curious comic opera.

Paine was relieved to find someone saying what he had been thinking. Greene said he was glad that Paine was there.

"It means very little," Paine protested.

"No, I'm trying to learn how to make a campaign, but what's the good if they don't know why they're fighting?"

"Do you think I can tell them?"

"I think so," Greene nodded.

"All right."

"Do you want an officership?" Greene inquired. "It can be arranged, you know. A captaincy, easily; you could be a colonel or a major if you wish to... we have so many of them, God knows."

No, I don't think so."

"In a way, it's a matter of respect," Greene said uncertainly.

"If I can't have their respect as Tom Paine, it's no good to me."

"Yes..."

"You see, all I can give them are reasons. I don't know anything about fighting."

Some three thousand men were taken, and Washington, watching the whole thing from a boat in the Hudson, saw what little hope he had left crumble and disappear.

Paine met him again only a few days before the fort was taken, and the Virginian had said, almost desperately:

"It's good to have you with us here. They don't know in Philadelphia... they think it's a very simple matter to make a war and a revolution."

"Talk to the men," Washington said. "Only talk to them and make them understand this thing."

Then the fort was lost and the end was in sight. Paine sat stolidly and watched young Knox weep out his rage and disappointment, but when he turned to the Englishman for sympathy, Paine, in one of his rare bitter moods, snapped:

" You poor damn fool, did you expect nothing to happen? Did you expect them to give us America?"

Rain changed to the winter's first snow on the road to New Brunswick, and marching through the slow drifting flakes, they were a column of sorry and forlorn ghosts, muskets and rusty bayonets, here and there a cocked hat, a bandage, a cannon or two trundling clumsily, no sound and no song and no cheering, the officers walking their horses with faces bent against the cold.

Paine walked beside a boy whose name was Clyde Matton, and who came from Maine. Carrying his own gun and the boy's, Paine had an arm around his thin shoulder. "The march is short," Paine said, "when one minds the road and not the steps."

"I reckon it's too long either way."

"There'll be a warm fire tonight."

"Little comfort in that. I'm thinking of going home."

"Home's a far way off. There're few men here, but good men."

He walked by the carts of the wounded and told them stories. They found him a good story teller; he could make things sound funny, and he was a fine mimic of accents. Already, he had picked up the vernacular of the various colonies, and he had a deadpan method of delivery, his heavy beaked nose inquiring for effect after each sentence.

In spite of what he had gone through, he had never been healthier physically; his large, freckled face inspired confidence, and whether it was a cart mired in the muck or a man fainted from weariness, Paine's big shoulders and slab like hands were ready and willing.

Before this, strength had meant nothing, the power of mules and work horses and slaves, but now it was something that gave him a heady sort of happiness... as once, when remaining behind with Knox and Alexander Hamilton and a dozen others to hold a rear guard crossing with a gun, he had alone driven off a flanking attack of dragoons, wading among the horses and sabers and flailing his big musket around his head like a light cane, taking nothing in return but a slight cut over the eye and a powder burn on the cheek.

Telling about it admiringly, young Hamilton said:

"He's filthy and slovenly enough when you come to that, but he's the bravest man I ever saw, and he has the strength of a madman."

The bloodstains they left on the road where their bare feet dragged made him refuse Greene's offer of boots; he wasn't acting, but he was living the one life that was undeniably his own, this thing called revolution, learning a technique among this defeated, fleeing army, learning the one life he might live.

At night, they made their fires when they could not march a step more, and it was Paine to do the cooking for a hundred men, Paine to calm a boy's fear, Paine to read a man a letter from his wife and write one in return.

Paine to sit with his strong hands clasped about his bent knees and slowly, simply explain what they were suffering for, the politics of an empire and a world, the struggles of mankind from the Romans to now, the new day of small men, not only in America but the world over.

The officers left him alone. He had hardly anything to do with them now, and they, in turn, realized that a dirty, unshaven English staymaker was one of the few things that kept what was left of the American cause from dissolving into thin air.

Washington was not the man Paine had met in Philadelphia, not the long, carefully groomed Virginia aristocrat, not the richest man in America and lord of Mt. Vernon, but haggard and skinny, the face drawn, the light gray eyes bloodshot, the buff and blue uniform, for all its launderings, spotted with dirt and bloodstains.

Washington was a man who said to Paine:

"Whatever you can do..."

"It's little that I can do," Paine nodded. "If you mean write something, it's hard to tell a man who is suffering and giving that he must suffer more and give more."

"I don't know you," the Virginian said. "But there are so many things I don't know now I thought I knew once. I don't know how to put my faith in a staymaker, but I am doing it. I am glad to call you my friend, Paine, and I would be proud if you'd take my hand, not as the writer of Common Sense, but as one man to another."

They shook hands, Paine with tears in his eyes. "If you can write something," Washington said, "not only for the army but for the whole country. We're so near to the end..."

Paine was thinking he would die gladly for this man, die or kneel on the ground he walked.

Well, writing was what a writing man should do. With the drum held between his knees, with the top tilted to catch the wavering light of the fire, he scratched and scratched away, all the night through.

The men gathered around him, men who knew Paine and loved him, men who had felt the strength of his arms, men who had slogged side by side with him. They read as he wrote, sometimes aloud in their stiff, nasal back country accents:

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. . . ."

They read:

" If there be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace . . ."
With bloodshot eyes, they read and spoke softly:

"I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake."

"Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and repulse it . . ."

" I thank God that I fear not," they read, and others on the edge of the crowd begged him, "Read it, Tom."

"Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to bind me in all cases whatsoever to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?"

"What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain or by an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in one case and pardon in the other."

"Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. . . ."

Hard, cruel, vulgar words they understood, and like a harsh and angry roar, their voices came: "Read it!"

On Christmas Day, at night, Washington did the impossible. His army dissolving as quickly as wet sand, he found it beyond his power to do as once he had planned, retreat westward and further westward, beyond the mountains if necessary, but never risk an engagement with the British.

After being battered and defeated time after time, he was coming to the realization that his course was not to fight a war of battles but a war of spaces, a war which might last for many, many years, but so long as his army was intact, one that he could not lose.

But his army was no longer intact. Unless some victory were achieved, some deed to spur the imagination of the people, it would cease to exist entirely. And at Christmas Day, at night, he recrossed the Delaware and attacked an encampment of drunken, sodden German mercenaries.

Washington Praying Before Crossing the Delaware

He took over a thousand prisoners; it was the first victory, sorely needed, and things that were almost at an end, began again.

For the time, the city was saved; people who had fled came back to Philadelphia, even the Congress, and to half a dozen of them, in a coffee house, Paine said things that were not easily forgotten. He was a little drunk.

To Roberdeau he made poor apologies, "Yes, I was drunk. How else can a man watch them?" They were planning campaigns on a table cloth, and they had it figured up and down, forward and backward, how Washington could win the war in a month. "To hell with the lot of you!" Paine said.

They asked him what he meant, and he said he meant that some had stayed in the city and some had run away.

"Without the Congress, the revolution ceases to exist," they parried.

"Without the Congress!" Paine roared. "God save us... but tell me, what has the Congress done? A city like this with a thousand men to hold the houses and barricade the streets could last forever... forever, I tell you, and the whole British Empire could not force its way through it.

But the Congress went, and the city lost its head, and I tell you, not you but Washington, not you but a few hundred poor ragged devils saved this cause! Not you!"

He was drunk, but they didn't quickly forget what he said. And between themselves, they decided that Paine might very well be dispensed with, that Paine was more a nuisance than an asset. They pointed to the clothes he wore, clothes not fit for a beggar, to his old, battered wig, to the fact that he carried a musket in the streets.

The armies had settled into the torpor of a cold winter, and Paine found a room where he could write. Another crisis was over, and the devil sat on his pen; he no longer had to seek for words; they came to him easily now, and every word was a bitter memory.

". . . never did men grow old in so short a time," he wrote. "We have crowded the business of an age into the compass of a few months..."

He would sit back and think of those months, and though he wrote easily enough, what he sought for did not come to him, he sought a rationalization, a scheme, and a progress for revolution; he wanted the whole and this was only a part.

When through the murk a half-formed vision of a world remade appeared, his own impotence and futility drove him half mad. Then he would drink, and the righteous souls could point to him and be sustained.

There were few pastors in Philadelphia that winter who did not preach a sermon on Tom Paine. One roared, "Look you upon the unrepentant! What cause is served or benefited by a foul mouth and a drunken brain? Is this liberty, this mocking specter that prowls the streets and defames all that is precious to mankind?"

To the few who stood by him, Paine said, "No, it's not war, not revolution; those who hate us sit on their asses and eat their three meals and sleep on feather beds, and who gives a damn that an army lies out there in the snow?"

And Paine came to live in the world within, where the ivory tower protected even the most sensitive. Soon enough he discovered that where the quaint inner circle of colonial politics began... reality stopped.

That war was being fought by a haggard, desperate little army led by a quiet and stubborn man called Washington, mattered so little to the Continental Congress of the United Thirteen Colonies that it was only by deliberate resolution that they could recall the nature of the situation.

On their side, it might be said that they were as impotent as any governing body could conceivably be; able to make treaties, they could not force observation of them; they had the right to coin money, but no power to buy gold or silver, and with the power to wage war, they could not raise a single soldier.

In the one worst moment of crisis, when Washington's shivering and defeated troops had finally crossed to the southwest bank of the Delaware, they had abdicated voluntarily, fled in panic from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and given to Washington the full power of a dictator.

Their knowledge of warfare was confined to the continental military tracts they read so feverishly; each had his own personal military theory and fought for it, and the only military fact they agreed in was that it would be ridiculous to fight the war in the one style Americans knew, the silent, terrible bushwacking tactics that had torn a British army to ribbons between Concord and Lexington.

They were split into parties, the pro- and anti-confederation; the northern party, the southern; the pro-reconciliation and anti-reconciliation; the pro-Washington and anti-Washington.

There were the isolationists who believed revolution was a property peculiar to Americans of pure British descent and of the eastern coast of North America and that all other persons and places should be excluded.

The nightmare of the Battle of Germantown Paine would not forget until his dying day. And a nightmare it was, so impossible a nightmare that not for months afterwards could the actual action be pieced together.

There was no talk, but rather a dazed, sullen expectancy as they waited for Washington. And then Hamilton came in, went to the table, and began to cram his mouth full, saying:

"Good, you know, have some."

"Where is he?"

"He'll be here. This is good breakfast, and you don't know when there'll be more."

"Angry?" Wayne asked.

"Just as always."

There weren't enough chairs. Some sat, others backed against the wall. Greene grasped Paine's arm and nodded. Then Washington came in, walking straight through and looking neither to left nor to right, pouring himself a cup of coffee and taking a piece of pone, and telling them, not harshly:

"Go ahead and eat, gentlemen."

Nevertheless, they were afraid of him. Paine had coffee; Greene stood with his legs planted wide, staring at the floor, as if there were some complicated problem there that defied his understanding. Pulaski pulled at his mustaches while tears welled into his very pale blue eyes, and Wayne bit his nails. And the big Virginian, eating slowly, said to them:

"There is no point in discussing yesterday, gentlemen. Tomorrow is more pertinent."

They looked at him, but no one answered."Make out your reports concerning the battle. We will go on and perhaps our fortunes will fare differently..."

And Washington, taking Paine by the arm, said:

"Tell me, sir, you were at Philadelphia, and was it bad?"

"Very bad."

"And do you think it very bad with us?"

"No," Paine said definitely.

"Why?"

"Because you are not afraid," Paine said quietly. "Just that?"

"Just that."

Then they shook hands.

Marching south to prevent reinforcements for the enemy from sailing up the Delaware, and failing in that. Failing at Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer. Failing in a child's ambuscade against a few hundred Hessians; failing in a simple maneuver because the men tripped and fell from weariness. Failure and failure and failure.

Twelve miles through the rain and muck, and a panicky scramble from a dozen British dragoons. Two thousand men slop along from dawn to dusk, and then one day the ground turns hard. The roads that were swamps, cut or worn in between the two shoulders of meadowland or forest, as most roads were at the time, become as nasty and sharp as corrugated iron.

A cow's track in the muck freezes and becomes a deadly weapon. A ripple of mud drives its point through a paper thin sole. A bloodspot stains the road, and then another, and then still another. Flakes of snow fall as if a down quilt were ripped open and fluffed across the sky. As a mark on the road, as a sign is the bright red blood in the cold white snow.

Now march north again, for word has come from the tall Virginian to join him. There is a place called the Valley Forge.

Washington rose as Paine entered the room, peering for a moment to identify the stranger, and then smiling and holding out his hand. He looked older, Paine noticed; war was making old men of this young and desperate group; thinner, too, and strangely innocent as he was now, wigless, in a dressing gown with an ancient cap on his head, his gray eyes larger than Paine had ever imagined them to be.

He was genuinely glad to see Paine, begged him to sit down and take off his coat, and then, in a very few words, described the tense and terrible situation at the encampment, the lack of food and clothing, the alarming increase in venereal disease, due to the abundance of women who lived with the men, some of them camp-followers, some of them wives, the daily desertions, the shortage of ammunition, the increasing anger even among the most loyal at the fact that they had not been paid for months.

"All that," Washington said softly. "I tell you it is worse than last year, and you remember that. Unless the country helps, we will break, I can tell you that, Paine. I can tell no one else, but, Paine, we are close to the finish... you must know. Not through the enemy, but ourselves, and then the revolution will go like a bad dream."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Go to Congress and plead. Go to the country and wake them up. Make them understand... tell them!"

"I want to stay here."

"Don't stay here, Paine. Here it is hell, and I don't think even you can help us. Go to Congress, and somehow we will last out this winter... I can't think of the next. Somehow, we will endure."

He found the Congress at York, and curiously enough he was welcomed. A dinner was given for him, and there were Rush, Abington, the Adams cousins, Lee, Hemingway, and others. The guest of honor was Tom Paine, shaven and with a new jacket and shoes.

"What he has seen and suffered," Hemingway said, "should be an inspiration for all of us." Well fed, honest men they were; claret was the drink of the evening, bottles sparkling up and down the table like a whole line of British redcoats.

"Shall one doubt the future of America?"

"I wonder," Paine thought.

They plied him with food and drink, and they talked of everything under the sun but the war. Not until the meal was done, the flip served, and the ladies had retired to the drawing room, did they come to the point. Then, over snuff and cigars, they pumped Paine about what he had seen at Germantown and Valley Forge.

"But you will admit that the leadership was mediocre?" they prodded him.

"The leadership, gentlemen, is sacrificing and courageous."

"But stupid."

"I deny that! Soldiers are not made overnight. We are not Prussians, but citizens of a republic."

"Yet you cannot deny that Washington has failed constantly. What you told us you saw at Valley Forge is only final proof of his unfitness!"

"Unfitness!" Paine said quietly. "My good gentlemen, God help you!"

"Aren't you dramatizing, Paine?"

"What is the case in point?" Paine asked. "Do you want to be rid of Washington?"

"Let us say, rather, cooperate with him," Lee said smoothly.

"What Gates has done at Saratoga, his capture of Burgoyne's entire army, proves..."

" Proves nothing!" Paine snapped. "Have you forgotten that Gates deliberately abandoned Washington at the Delaware last year?

I'm not afraid of words, gentlemen, and I'd as soon say traitor as anything else. At a price, Gates will sell, and I am not sure others haven't a price... ' staring from face to face.

"Paine, you're drunk!"

"Am I? Then I'll say what I would never dare to sober... I'll say, gentlemen, that you disgust me, that you are breaking down all that is decent in our Congress, that you are ready to sell, yes, damn it, ready to sell, and that when you lose Washington, you lose the war..."

Paine was beginning to understand his new profession, the skill called revolution which he was the first to practice as a sole reason for being. He had seen the people take power, and the means by which they took power; he had seen their appointed leaders, citizens whose livelihood was not war, rally them against the enemy.

He had seen the counter revolution rear its head again and again, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Jersey, and in Pennsylvania. He had seen the army split up into opposing groups, and he had seen staunch patriots eager to sell out to the highest bidder.

And now he was watching one of the final phases, a cleavage between the people's party and the party of finance, of trade and power and aristocracy. And strangely enough these latter forces were united against one who was reputedly the wealthiest man in America: the Virginia farmer, Washington.

First, it was a plot to deprive Washington of the command and give it to Gates; then, to dirty his reputation and split the high command from him; and now, lastly, a direct sellout to Great Britain.

England sent across the ocean a party of gentlemen with very broad powers; they knew whom to contact. Paine sent a messenger to Washington and wrote with fury in his pen.

A Crisis appeared in which Paine, raging mad, wrote: "What sort of men or Christians must you suppose the Americans to be, who, after seeing their most humble petitions insultingly rejected; the most grievous laws passed to distress them in every quarter; an undeclared war let loose upon them, and Indians and Negroes invited to the slaughter; who, after seeing their kinsmen murdered, their fellow citizens starved to death in prisons, and their houses and property destroyed and burned; who, after the most serious appeals to heaven, the most solemn adjuration by oath of all government connected with you, and the most heartfelt pledges and protestations of faith to each other; and who, after soliciting the friendship, and entering into alliance with other nations, should at last break through all these obligations, civil and divine, by complying with your horrid and infernal proposal. . . ."

"You seem to enjoy making enemies, Paine."

"I have so many that a few more don't matter."

"A friend might help. A quiet tongue might, too."

"My only friend is the revolution. And my tongue wags like the tongue of any damned peasant."

"Just a word of warning... "

"I don't have to be warned, my friend," Paine smiled.

Suddenly, not in a day nor a week, but suddenly enough after all the years, the war was being won, not over yet, no treaty of peace signed, but nevertheless won, the heartache and hopelessness finished, a British army trapped at York town, the British cause in America torn to shreds, a French grant of several millions solving the financial problem, the Tories shattered.

Then it was Paine alone and frightened, looking at all this, and wondering, "Where am I? Who am I?"

The props had been knocked from under him; always on the outside, always the man behind the scenes, always the propagandist, he found a time now when there was no need for propaganda, no need for men behind the scenes.

In a victorious army, the pleading, exhorting figure of Paine would stir only laughter. His trade was revolution, and now he was without a trade.

Washington came to Philadelphia for a triumph, but it was a hollow triumph; his stepson had just died. The tall Virginian looked wasted and empty, and when he called for Paine, they were like two men left over. Paine was ashamed of his dirty clothes, his appearance, his mottled face.

" My old friend," Washington said.

Paine began to brag; he was thinking of doing a history of the revolution. Did Washington know how many copies of Common Sense had been printed?

" I know my own value," Paine boasted.

Thinking of how perspectives changed, of what a wretched creature this scribbler was, away from the campfires and disillusioned, mutinous men, Washington smiled and said, "My dear Paine, no one of us will ever forget your value."

"On two fronts, the home front and the fighting front, it was Paine who kept the cause together... I tell you that with the deepest conviction, my good friend... "

They parted soon after, and Washington was not there to see Paine weep.

Some writing, drawing pay from a government that no longer needed him, a new suit of clothes, a piece explaining the revolution to Europe, an emasculated piece, another Crisis with a touch of the old fire... why isn't peace formalized?

Old soldiers dropped in; they talked of a thousand years ago, when they marched from Hackensack to the Delaware; but there was another trend of talk. The future bulked bright and large in America. But how for him?

Desperately, he tried to interest himself in the future of America, the spoils and the glory, the boasting and memories, the speculations, the coming boom, the pride of being a free citizen in a great republic.

"Where freedom is not, there is my country," he had said once.

The peace came; America strutted like a peacock, free and independent. Fireworks and flag waving and speeches and banquets and glory without end.

" The times that tried men's souls are over... and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished. . . ."

Betsy Ross Flag

[Tom Paine helped free America and it's people from tyranny. Some years later he wrote a book called, The Age of Reason, which he hoped would free their minds. In the book he attached the Christian Church and the Bible and in the cities and towns where once they hailed him, "Well done, Ol' Common Sense," they now cursed his name and threw stones.

He was seventy-two years old when he died on the eighth of June, 1809.
Not a single clergyman approached would allow him space in the church cemetery to be buried. Only seven people attended the funeral of this great man and national hero when he was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York.]

But it was not enough for the good people of New Rochelle that he had been buried in unhallowed ground. They invaded the farm and ripped the branches from the trees Madame Bonneville had planted, and sold them for souvenirs. They hacked pieces off the tombstone; they pulled up the few flowers that had grown.

Ten years later, a man named William Cobbett had a scheme. He dug up Paine's bones and took them to England, intending to exhibit them in various cities. But the British government refused to permit this last, crowning infamy, and the bones disappeared somewhere in England.

So today, no one knows where Paine lies, and that, perhaps, is best, for the world was his village.

[I have taken the liberty of dividing some of Paine's page long paragraphs into a more readable format.]

Common Sense
by
Thomas Paine

Published in 1776, Common Sense challenged the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy. The plain language that Paine used spoke to the common people of America and was the first work to openly ask for independence and freedom from Great Britain.

Introduction

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his OWN RIGHT, to support the Parliament in what he calls THEIRS, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpation of either.

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested.

The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is the AUTHOR.

I know it is difficult to get over local or long standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English Constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials.

First. — The remains of Monarchical tyranny in the person of the King.

Secondly. — The remains of Aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the Peers.

Thirdly. — The new Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.

The two first, by being hereditary, are independent of the People; wherefore in a CONSTITUTIONAL SENSE they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the State.

To say that the constitution of England is an UNION of three powers, reciprocally CHECKING each other, is farcical; either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.

First. — That the King it not to be trusted without being looked after; or in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.

Secondly. — That the Commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the Crown.

But as the same constitution which gives the Commons a power to check the King by withholding the supplies, gives afterwards the King a power to check the Commons, by empowering him to reject their other bills; it again supposes that the King is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him. A mere absurdity!

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required.

But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING.

Complete article: http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/commonsense/singlehtml.htm

"We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin, 4 July 1776 .
***
Note: there is no evidence that Paine was vegetarian, but his thinking was very influential on those who followed. (International Vegetarian Union) http://www.ivu.org/
Quote:
The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.
The Age of Reason

The Crisis
by
Thomas Paine

December 23, 1776

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Whether the independence of the continent was declared too soon, or delayed too long, I will not now enter into as an argument; my own simple opinion is, that had it been eight months earlier, it would have been much better. We did not make a proper use of last winter, neither could we, while we were in a dependent state.

However, the fault, if it were one, was all our own; we have none to blame but ourselves. But no great deal is lost yet. All that Howe has been doing for this month past, is rather a ravage than a conquest, which the spirit of the Jerseys, a year ago, would have quickly repulsed, and which time and a little resolution will soon recover.

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the king of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence as he.

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth [fifteenth] century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc.

Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment! Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before.

But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer.

They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.

As I was with the troops at Fort Lee, and marched with them to the edge of Pennsylvania, I am well acquainted with many circumstances, which those who live at a distance know but little or nothing of. Our situation there was exceedingly cramped, the place being a narrow neck of land between the North River and the Hackensack. Our force was inconsiderable, being not one-fourth so great as Howe could bring against us.

We had no army at hand to have relieved the garrison, had we shut ourselves up and stood on our defence. Our ammunition, light artillery, and the best part of our stores, had been removed, on the apprehension that Howe would endeavor to penetrate the Jerseys, in which case Fort Lee could be of no use to us; for it must occur to every thinking man, whether in the army or not, that these kind of field forts are only for temporary purposes, and last in use no longer than the enemy directs his force against the particular object which such forts are raised to defend.

Such was our situation and condition at Fort Lee on the morning of the 20th of November, when an officer arrived with information that the enemy with 200 boats had landed about seven miles above; Major General [Nathaniel] Green, who commanded the garrison, immediately ordered them under arms, and sent express to General Washington at the town of Hackensack, distant by the way of the ferry = six miles.

Our first object was to secure the bridge over the Hackensack, which laid up the river between the enemy and us, about six miles from us, and three from them. General Washington arrived in about three-quarters of an hour, and marched at the head of the troops towards the bridge, which place I expected we should have a brush for; however, they did not choose to dispute it with us, and the greatest part of our troops went over the bridge, the rest over the ferry, except some which passed at a mill on a small creek, between the bridge and the ferry, and made their way through some marshy grounds up to the town of Hackensack, and there passed the river.

We brought off as much baggage as the wagons could contain, the rest was lost. The simple object was to bring off the garrison, and march them on till they could be strengthened by the Jersey or Pennsylvania militia, so as to be enabled to make a stand.

We staid four days at Newark, collected our out-posts with some of the Jersey militia, and marched out twice to meet the enemy, on being informed that they were advancing, though our numbers were greatly inferior to theirs.

Howe, in my little opinion, committed a great error in generalship in not throwing a body of forces off from Staten Island through Amboy, by which means he might have seized all our stores at Brunswick, and intercepted our march into Pennsylvania; but if we believe the power of hell to be limited, we must likewise believe that their agents are under some providential control.

I shall not now attempt to give all the particulars of our retreat to the Delaware; suffice it for the present to say, that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.

Complete article: http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/crisis/c-01.htm

[So Tom, what to say... thank you, for this great country that you helped to create and all your help. You to, Bill, thank you, for all your help.]