Part 9 (1/2)
Before me lies a letter from W.M. van der Weyde, the president of the Thomas Paine National Historical a.s.sociation. One paragraph meets my eyes at this moment:
”Paine was, without doubt, the very biggest figure that ever lived in 'Greenwich Village.' I think, on investigation, you will realise the truth of this statement.”
I have realised it. And that is why I conceive no book on Greenwich complete without a chapter devoted to him who came to be known as ”the great Commoner of Mankind.” He spoke of himself as a ”citizen of the world,” and there are many quarters of the globe that can claim a share in his memory, so we will claim it, too!
It is true that Thomas Paine lived but a short time in Greenwich, and that the long play of his full and colourful career was enacted before he came to spend his last days in the Village. But he is none the less an essential part of Greenwich; his ill.u.s.trious memory is so signal a source of pride to the neighbourhood, his personality seems still so vividly present, that his life and acts must have a place there, too.
The street that was named ”Reason” because of him, suggests the persecutions abroad and at home which followed the writing of that extraordinary and daring book ”The Age of Reason.” The name of Mme. de Bonneville, who chose for him the little frame house on the site which is now about at 59 Grove Street, recalls his dramatic life chapter in Paris, where he first met the De Bonnevilles. So, you see, one cannot write of Thomas Paine in Greenwich, without writing of Thomas Paine in the great world--working, fighting, pleading, suffering, lighting a million fires of courage and of inspiration, living so hard and fast and strenuously, that to read over his experiences, his experiments and his achievements, is like reading the biographies of a score of different busy men!
He was born of Quaker parentage, at Thetford, Norfolk, in England, on January 29, 1737, and pursued many avocations before he found his true vocation--that of a world liberator, and apostle of freedom and human rights. One of his most sympathetic commentators, H.M. Brailsford, says of him:
”His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong to romance.... In his spirit of adventure, in his pa.s.sion for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic.
Paine thought in prose and acted epics. He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite in deeds.”
Let us see where this impulse of romance and adventure led him; it was into strange enough paths at first!
He was a mere boy--fifteen or sixteen, if I remember accurately--when the lure of the sea seized him. It is reported that he signed up on a privateer (the Captain of which was appropriately called Death!), putting out from England, and sailed with her piratical crew for a year. This was doubtless adventurous enough, but young Thomas already wanted adventure of a different and a higher order. He came back and went into his Quaker father's business--which was that of a staymaker, of all things! He got his excitement by studying _astronomy_!
Then he became an exciseman--what was sometimes called ”gauger”--and was speedily cas.h.i.+ered for negligence. Anyone may have three guesses as to his reported next ambition. More than one historian has declared that he wished to take orders in the Church of England. This is, however, extremely unlikely. In any case, he changed his mind in time, and was again taken on as exciseman. Likewise, he was again dismissed.
This time they fired him for advocating higher wages and writing a pamphlet on the subject. The reform fever had caught him, you perceive, and he was nevermore free from it, to the day of his death.
He was a brilliant mathematician and an ingenious inventor. Brailsford says that his inventions were ”partly useful, partly whimsical.” They would be, of course. They included a crane, a planing-machine, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor--besides his really big and notable invention of the first iron bridge.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 59, GROVE STREET. On the site of the house where Thomas Paine died.]
But that came later. Before leaving England, in addition to his other and varied occupations, he ran a ”tobacco mill,” and was twice married. One wife died, and from the other he was separated. At all events, at thirty-seven, alone and friendless, with empty pockets and a letter from Benjamin Franklin as his sole a.s.set, he set sail for America in the year 1774.
Of course he went to the Quaker City, and speedily became the editor of the _Pennsylvania Magazine_, through the pages of which he cried a new message of liberty and justice to the troubled Colonies. He, an Englishman, urged America to break away from England; he, of Quaker birth and by heredity and training opposed to fighting, advocated the most stringent steps for the consummation of national freedom. In that clear-eyed and disinterested band of men who conceived and cradled our Republic, Paine stands a giant even among giants.
Many persons believe that it was he who actually composed and wrote the Declaration of Independence; it is certain that he is more than half responsible for it. The very soul and fibre and living spirit of the United States was the soul and fibre and living spirit of Thomas Paine, and, in the highest American standards and traditions, remains the same today.
In 1775 he wrote ”Common Sense”--the book which was, as one historian declares, the ”clarion call for separation from England,” and which swept the country. Edmund Randolph drily ascribes American independence first to George III and second to Paine. Five hundred thousand copies of the pamphlet were sold, and he might easily have grown rich on the proceeds, but he could never find it in his conscience to make money out of patriotism, and he gave every cent to the war fund.
This splendid fire-eating Quaker--is there anything stauncher than a fighting Quaker?--proceeded to enlist in the Pennsylvania division of the Flying Camp under General Roberdeau; then he went as aide-de-camp to General Greene. It was in 1776 that he started his ”Crisis,” a series of stirring and patriotic addresses in pamphlet form. General Was.h.i.+ngton ordered the first copy read aloud to every regiment in the Continental Army, and its effect is now history.
Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x has written of this:
”... Many of the soldiers were shoeless and left b.l.o.o.d.y footprints on the snow-covered line of march. All were but half-hearted at this time and many utterly discouraged.
Was.h.i.+ngton wrote most apprehensively concerning the situation to the Congress. Paine, in the meantime (himself a soldier, with General Greene's army on the retreat from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Newark), realising the necessity of at once instilling renewed hope and courage in the soldiers if the cause of liberty was to be saved, wrote by campfire at night the first number of his soul-stirring 'Crisis.'”
It was before Trenton that those weary and disheartened soldiers,--ragged, barefoot, half frozen and more than half starved--first heard the words that have echoed down the years:
_”These are the times that try men's souls!”_
They answered that call; every man of them answered Paine's heart cry, as they took up their muskets again. It was with that immortal sentence as a war slogan, that the Battle of Trenton was won.
Is it any wonder that in England the ”Crisis” was ordered to be burned by the hangman? It was a more formidable enemy than anything ever devised in the shape of steel or powder!
A list of Paine's services to this country would be too long to set down here. The a.s.sociation dedicated to his memory and honour cites twenty-four important reasons why he stands among the very first and n.o.blest figures in American history. And there are dozens more that they don't cite. He did things that were against possibility. When the patriot cause was weak for lack of money he gave a year's salary to start a bank to finance the army, and coaxed, commanded and hypnotised other people into subscribing enough to carry it. He went to Paris and induced the French King to give $6,000,000 to American independence.
He wrote ”Rights of Man” and the ”Age of Reason,”--and, incidentally, was outlawed in England and imprisoned in France! He did more and received less compensation for what he did, either in worldly goods or in grat.i.tude, than any figure in relatively recent history.