As in North Carolina had occurred the first armed resistance to British
oppressions (1771), and its Mecklenburg County been the first to
organize a government independent of the Crown, so was that colony
the first to instruct its delegates in Congress to vote for national
independence. She was followed in succession by South Carolina,*
Virginia,** Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
Georgia, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Maryland passed
patriotic resolutions, but not sufficiently decisive for its delegates
to act. New York alone forbade its delegates to vote for independence.
* Colonel Gadsden, having left the Continental Congress to
take command in South Carolina, appeared in the provincial
Congress at Charleston February 10,1776. "Col. Gadsden
(having brought the first copy of Paine's pamphlet 'Common
Sense, etc.,') boldly declared himself... for the
absolute Independence of America. This last sentiment came
like an explosion of thunder on the members" (Rev. John
Drayton's Memoirs; etc., p. 172). The sentiment was
abhorred, and a member "called the author of 'Common Sense'
--------"; but on March 21st the pamphlet was reinforced by
tidings of an Act of Parliament (Dec. 21, 1775) for seizure
of American ships, and on March 23d South Carolina
instructed its delegates at Philadelphia to agree to
whatever that Congress should "judge necessary, etc."
** A thousand copies of "Common Sense" were at once ordered
from Virginia, and many more followed. On April 1st
Washington writes to Joseph Reed: "By private letters which
I have lately received from Virginia, I find 'Common Sense'
is working a wonderful change there in the minds of many
men." On June 29th union with England was "totally dissolved"
by Virginia.
Meanwhile, on June 7th, Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginians,
had submitted resolutions of independence; but as six States hesitated,
Congress adjourned the decision until July 1st, appointing, however,
(June 11th) a committee to consider the proper form of the probable
Declaration--Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, and
Robert R. Livingston. But this interval, from June 7th to July 1st,
was perilous for independence. News came of the approach of Lord Howe
bearing from England the "olive branch." The powerful colonies New York
and Pennsylvania were especially anxious to await the proposals
for peace. At this juncture Paine issued one of his most effective
pamphlets, "A Dialogue between the Ghost of General Montgomery, Just
Arrived from the Ely-sian Fields, and an American Delegate, in a Wood
near Philadelphia." Montgomery, the first heroic figure fallen in the
war, reproaches the hesitating delegate for willingness to accept pardon
from a royal criminal for defending "the rights of humanity." He points
out that France only awaits their declaration of independence to come
to their aid, and that America "teems with patriots, heroes, and
legislators who are impatient to burst forth into light and importance."
The most effective part of the pamphlet, however, was a reply to the
commercial apprehensions of New York and Pennsylvania. "Your dependance
upon the Crown is no advantage, but rather an injury, to the people of
Great Britain, as it increases the power and influence of the King. The
people are benefited only by your trade, and this they may have after
you are independent of the Crown." There is a shrewd prescience of what
actually happened shown in this opportune work. Of course the gallant
ghost remarks that "monarchy and aristocracy have in all ages been the
vehicles of slavery." The allusion to the arming of negroes and Indians
against America, and other passages, resemble clauses in one of the
paragraphs eliminated from the original Declaration of Independence.
At this time Paine saw much of Jefferson, and there can be little doubt
that the anti-slavery clause struck out of the Declaration was written
by Paine, or by some one who had Paine's anti-slavery essay before him.
In the following passages it will be observed that the antitheses are
nearly the same--"infidel and Christian," "heathen and Christian."
[Illustration: Anti-slavery essay 117-118]
PARAGRAPH STRUCK OUT OF THE DECLARATION.
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people
who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is
the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep
open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted
his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or
restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors
might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very
people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which
he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded
them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of
one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES
of another."
THOMAS PAINE.
"--these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them,
tempting kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and
hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners.
By such wicked and inhuman ways the English, etc.... an hight of outrage
that seems left by Heathen nations to be practised by pretended Chris
Hansr
"--that barbarous and hellish power which has stirred up the Indians and
Negroes to destroy us; the cruelty hath a double guilt--it is dealing
brutally by us and treacherously by them."
Thus did Paine try to lay at the corner the stone which the builders
rejected, and which afterwards ground their descendants to powder.
Jefferson withdrew the clause on the objection of Georgia and South
Carolina, which wanted slaves, and of Northerners interested in
supplying them. That, however, was not known till all the parties were
dead. Paine had no reason to suppose that the Declaration of human
freedom and equality, passed July 4th, could fail eventually to include
the African slaves. The Declaration embodied every principle he had been
asserting, and indeed Cobbett is correct in saying that whoever may
have written the Declaration Paine was its author. The world being his
country, and America having founded its independence on such universal
interests, Paine could not hesitate to become a soldier for mankind.*
His Quaker principles, always humanized, were not such as would applaud
a resistance in which he was not prepared to participate. While the
signers of the Declaration of Independence were affixing their names--a
procedure which reached from August 2d into November--Paine resigned his
_Pennsylvania Magazine_, and marched with his musket to the front. He
enlisted in a Pennsylvania division of the Flying Camp of ten thousand
men, who were to be sent wherever needed. He was under General
Roberdeau, and assigned at first to service at Amboy, afterwards at
Bergen. The Flying Camp was enlisted for a brief period, and when that
had expired Paine travelled to Fort Lee, on the Hudson, and renewed his
enlistment. Fort Lee was under the command of General Nathaniel
Greene who, on or about September 19th, appointed Paine a Volunteer
Aide-de-camp.
* Professor John Fiske (whose "American Revolution" suffers
from ignorance of Paine's papers) appreciates the effect of
Paine's "Common Sense" but not its cause. He praises the
pamphlet highly, but proves that he has only glanced at it
by his exception: "The pamphlet is full of scurrilous abuse
of the English people; and resorts to such stupid arguments
as the denial of the English origin of the Americans" (i.,
p. 174). Starting with the principle that the cause of
America is "the cause of all mankind," Paine abuses no
people, but only their oppressors. As to Paine's argument,
it might have appeared less "stupid" to Professor Fiske had
he realized that in Paine's mind negroes were the equals of
whites. However, Paine does not particularly mention negroes;
his argument was meant to carry its point, and it might
have been imprudent for him, in that connection, to have
classed the slaves with the Germans, who formed a majority
in Pennsylvania, and with the Dutch of New York. In replying
to the "Mother-Country" argument it appears to me far from
stupid to point out that Europe is our parent country, and
that if English descent made men Englishmen, the descendants
of William the Conqueror and half the peers of England were
Frenchmen, and, if the logic held, should be governed by
France.
General Greene in a gossipy letter to his wife (November 2d) says:
"Common Sense (Thomas Paine) and Colonel Snarl, or Cornwell, are
perpetually wrangling about mathematical problems." On November 20th
came the surprise of Fort Lee; the boiling kettles and baking ovens of a
dinner to be devoured by the British were abandoned, with three hundred
tents, for a retreat made the more miserable by hunger and cold. By
November 22d the whole army had retreated to Newark, where Paine began
writing his famous first _Crisis_.*
* Sec Almon's Remembrancer, 1777, p. 28, for Paine's graphic
journal of this retreat, quoted from the Pennsylvania
Journal. In reply to those who censured the retreat as
pusillanimous, he states that "our army was at one time less
than a thousand effective men and never more than 4,000,"
the pursuers being "8,000 exclusive of their artillery and
light horse"; he declares that posterity will call the
retreat "glorious--and the names of Washington and Fabius
will run paralell to eternity." In the Pennsylvania Packet
(March 20, 1779) Paine says: "I had begun the first number
of the Crisis while on the retreat, at Newark, with a design
of publishing it in the Jersies, as it was General
Washington's intention to have made a stand at Newark, could
he have been timely reenforced; instead of which nearly
half the army left him at that place, or soon after, their
time being out."
He could only write at night; during the day there was constant work for
every soldier of the little force surrounding Washington. "I am wearied
almost to death with the retrogade motion of things," wrote Washington
to his brother (November 9th), "and I solemnly protest that a pecuniary
reward of twenty thousand pounds a year would not induce me to undergo
what I do; and after all, perhaps to lose my character, as it is
impossible, under such a variety of distressing circumstances, to
conduct matters agreeably to public expectation." On November 27th
he writes from Newark to General Lee: "It has been more owing to the
badness of the weather that the enemy's progress has been checked, than
to any resistance we could make." Even while he wrote the enemy drew
near, and the next day (November 28th) entered one end of Newark
as Washington left the other. At Brunswick he was joined by General
Williamson's militia, and on the Delaware by the Philadelphia militia,
and could muster five thousand against Howe's whole army. "I tremble
for Philadelphia," writes Washington to Lund Washington (December 10th).
"Nothing in my opinion, but General Lee's speedy arrival, who has been
long expected, though still at a distance (with about three thousand
men), can save it." On December 13th Lee was a prisoner, and on the 17th
Washington writes to the same relative:
"Your imagination can scarce extend to a situation more distressing than
mine. Our only dependence now is upon the speedy enlistment of a new
army. If this fails, I think the game will be pretty well up, as from
disaffection and want of spirit and fortitude, the inhabitants, instead
of resistance, are offering submission and taking protection from Gen.
Howe in Jersey."
The day before, he had written to the President of Congress that the
situation was critical, and the distresses of his soldiers "extremely
great, many of 'em being entirely naked and most so thinly clad as to be
unfit for service." On December 18th he writes to his brother:
"You can form no idea of the perplexity of my situation. No man, I
believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties, and less means to
extricate himself from them. However, under a full persuasion of the
justice of our cause, I cannot entertain an Idea that it will finally
sink, tho' it may remain for some time under a cloud."
Under that cloud, by Washington's side, was silently at work the force
that lifted it Marching by day, listening to the consultations of
Washington and his generals, Paine wrote by the camp fires; the winter
storms, the Delaware's waves, were mingled with his ink; the half-naked
soldiers in their troubled sleep dreaming of their distant homes, the
skulking deserter creeping off in the dusk, the pallid face of the
heavy-hearted commander, made the awful shadows beneath which was
written that leaflet which went to the Philadelphia printer along with
Washington's last foreboding letters to his relatives in Virginia. It
was printed on December 19th,* and many copies reached the camp above
Trenton Falls on the eve of that almost desperate attack on which
Washington had resolved. On the 23d December he wrote to Colonel Joseph
Reed:
* The pamphlet was dated December 23rd, but it had appeared
on the 19th in the Pennsylvania Journal, the pen none have
achieved such vast results as Paine's "Common Sense" and
his first _Crisis_, Before the battle of Trenton the half-
clad, dis-heartened soldiers of Washington were
called together in groups to listen to that thrilling
exhortation.
"Christmas-day, at night, one hour before day, is the time fixed upon
for our attempt on Trenton. For Heaven's sake keep this to yourself, as
the discovery of it may prove fatal to us; our numbers, sorry I am
to say, being less than I had any conception of; but necessity, dire
necessity will, nay must, justify any attempt."
America has known some utterances of the lips equivalent to decisive
victories in the field,--as some of Patrick Henry's, and the address of
President Lincoln at Gettysburg.
The opening words alone were a victory.
"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 his
country; but he that stands 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; 't is dearness
only that gives everything 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."
Not a chord of faith, or love, or hope was left untouched. The very
faults of the composition, which the dilettanti have picked out, were
effective to men who had seen Paine on the march, and knew these things
were written in sleepless intervals of unwearied labors. He speaks of
what Joan of Arc did in "the fourteenth century," and exclaims: "Would
that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen,
and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment!" Joan was
born in 1410, but Paine had no cyclopaedia in his knapsack. The literary
musket reaches its mark. The pamphlet was never surpassed for true
eloquence--that is, for the power that carries its point. With skilful
illustration of lofty principles by significant details, all summed with
simplicity and sympathy, three of the most miserable weeks ever endured
by men were raised into epical dignity. The wives, daughters, mothers,
sisters, seemed stretching out appealing hands against the mythically
monstrous Hessians. The great commander, previously pointed to as "a
mind that can even flourish upon care," presently saw his dispirited
soldiers beaming with hope, and bounding to the onset,--their watchword:
_These are the times that try men's souls_! /Trenton was won, the
Hessians captured, and a New Year broke for America on the morrow of
that Christmas Day, 1776.*
* Paine's enemy, Cheetham, durst not, in the face of
Washington's expression of his "lively sense of the
importance of your [Paine's] works," challenge well known
facts, and must needs partly confess them: "The number was
read in the camp, to every corporal's guard, and in the army
and out of it had more than the intended effect. The
convention of New York, reduced by dispersion, occasioned by
alarm, to nine members, was rallied and reanimated.
Militiamen who, already tired of the war, were straggling
from the army, returned. Hope succeeded to despair,
cheerfulness to gloom, and firmness to irresolution. To the
confidence which it inspired may be attributed much of the
brilliant little affair which in the same month followed at
Trenton." Even Oldys is somewhat impressed by Paine's
courage: "The Congress fled. All were dismayed. Not so
our author."
Paine's Trenton musket had hardly cooled, or the pen of his first
_Crisis_ dried, before he began to write another. It appeared about
four weeks after the battle and is addressed to Lord Howe. The Thetford
mechanic has some pride in confronting this English lord who had offered
the Americans mercy. "Your lordship, I find, has now commenced author,
and published a Proclamation; I have published a Crisis." The rumors of
his being a hireling scribe, or gaining wealth by his publications, made
it necessary for Paine to speak of himself at the conclusion:
"What I write is pure nature, and my pen and my soul have ever gone
together. My writings I have always given away, receiving only the
expense of printing and paper, and sometimes not even that. I never
counted either fame or interest, and my manner of life, to those who
know it, will justify what I say. My study is to be useful, and if your
lordship loves mankind as well as I do, you would, seeing you cannot
conquer us, cast about and lend your hand towards accomplishing a peace.
Our independence, with God's blessing, we will maintain against all the
world; but as we wish to avoid evil ourselves, we wish not to inflict it
on others. I am never over-inquisitive into the secrets of the cabinet,
but I have some notion that, if you neglect the present opportunity, it
will not be in our power to make a separate peace with you afterwards;
for whatever treaties or alliances we form we shall most faithfully
abide by; wherefore you may be deceived if you think you can make it
with us at any time."
Thus the humble author of the Crisis offers the noble author of the
Proclamation "mercy," on condition of laying down his arms, and going
home; but it must be at once!
If Howe, as is most likely, considered this mere impudence, he presently
had reason to take it more seriously. For there were increasing
indications that Paine was in the confidence of those who controlled
affairs. On January 21st he was appointed by the Council of Safety in
Philadelphia secretary to the commission sent by Congress to treat with
the Indians at Easton, Pennsylvania. The commissioners, with a thousand
dollars' worth of presents, met the Indian chiefs in the German Reformed
Church (built 1776), and, as they reported to Congress, "after shaking
hands, drinking rum, while the organ played, we proceeded to business."*
* Condit's "History of Easton," pp. 60, 118,
The report was, no doubt, written by Paine, who for his services
was paid L300 by the Pennsylvania Assembly (one of its advances for
Congress, afterwards refunded). In a public letter, written in 1807,
Paine relates an anecdote concerning this meeting with the Indians.
"The chief of the tribes, who went by the name of King Last-night,
because his tribe had sold their lands, had seen some English men-of-war
in some of the waters of Canada, and was impressed with the power of
those great canoes; but he saw that the English made no progress against
us by land. This was enough for an Indian to form an opinion by. He
could speak some English, and in conversation with me, alluding to the
great canoes, he gave me his idea of the power of a king of England, by
the following metaphor. 'The king of England,' said he, 'is like a fish.
When he is in the water he can wag his tail; when he comes on land he
lays down on his side.' Now if the English government had but half
the sense this Indian had, they would not have sent Duckworth to
Constantinople, and Douglas to Norfolk, to lay down on their side."
On April 17th, when Congress transformed the "Committee of Secret
Correspondence" into the "Committee of Foreign Affairs," Paine was
elected its secretary. His friend, Dr. Franklin, had reached France in
December, 1776, where Arthur Lee and Silas Deane were already at work.
Lord Howe might, indeed, have done worse than take Paine's advice
concerning the "opportunity," which did not return. General Howe did,
indeed, presently occupy a fine abode in Philadelphia, but only kept it
warm, to be afterwards the executive mansion of President Washington.
{1777}