Patriots by A. J. Langguth

Author:A. J. Langguth [Langguth, A. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-09-17T07:00:00+00:00

Thomas Jefferson in 1768

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Jefferson

1775–76

EARLY IN the winter of 1776, John Adams read a new pamphlet with a provocative title. He sent a copy to Abigail Adams and predicted that its arguments would soon become common faith on the American continent. The pamphlet, Common Sense, had been published anonymously by a recent immigrant from England. Despite Adams’ admiration, much about the essay irritated him, not the least its phenomenal success. Already more than a hundred thousand copies had been sold, and patriots everywhere were praising it. Adams thought the author’s reliance on the Old Testament as his authority was merely ridiculous, but the extreme democratic ideas in Common Sense were dangerous, and Adams wrote an essay to refute them. His rebuttal led the author to call one night on Adams at his Philadelphia lodgings.

Thomas Paine was thirty-eight, two years younger than Adams, but his life had been equally eventful and considerably more raffish. He had been raised in the Church of England, although his father, a corset-maker, was attracted to the Quakers. Thomas’ sour mother was a trial to him. When he read The Taming of the Shrew he concluded that she might have provided the model. He also learned as a boy that the fine gentlemen in his town of Thetford had no scruples about sending hungry children to the gallows for stealing.

As his belief in British justice eroded, the Quakers caused Thomas to question God’s divine plan with their belief that He was too good to permit His own son’s death to save other men. In time, Thomas found the Quaker outlook too gray; he preferred the world in all its gaudy colors, but he retained a sympathy for the sect. He read a natural history of Virginia and, captivated by the lushness of its southern vistas, vowed that he would cross the Atlantic to the new world one day.

In the meantime, he took a wife and a badly paid job as a tax collector. His wife died in childbirth, and after he had been barely a year on the job the government removed him when he was caught out in a common ruse among the collectors: instead of traveling through the countryside collecting taxes, they had stayed home and simply issued stamps without checking inventories or assets. Paine could find no other work, and at the age of twenty-eight he was forced to beg for his job back.

By that time, Paine had become more aggressive. He had been driven to his past offense by low wages, and now he resolved to improve the pay of all excisemen. He was already proving that he had a gift for debating. A group of friends met regularly at the White Hart tavern to drink and wrangle, and the next morning they sent a prize—an old copy of Homer in Greek that they called the Headstrong Book—to the man who had been the most obstinate haranguer; usually the book went to Paine. The nights when Quakers joined the group, they sometimes

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