Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast

earth I hate more than war.”
    Paine wasn’t surprised when the Congress made Washington commander in chief of the rabble of Yankee farmers who lay like hungry wolves around Boston. There was something about the tall, dry-faced Virginian that made people trust him. “As they always trust stupidity,” the Philadelphia wits said. But Paine wasn’t certain of that, and on the day when Washington rode through the streets, cheered wildly, Paine stood in the crowd and tried to understand what dull, curious force in the man could draw out the admiration of these shouting fools.
    Although a state of actual war was beginning to exist that summer of 1775, the people of Philadelphia could not take it quite seriously. For one thing, Massachusetts was so far away; for another, business was good. Even when news came to town that there had been a terrible, bloody battle fought in Boston, at a place called Breed’s Hill, and that the redcoat dead lay like pigs in a slaughtering pen, it did not seem quite real to Philadelphia. After their first rush of enthusiasm, the militia enlistments fell off sharply; the wags did caricatures of the citizen soldiers. The drills became sloppy affairs; the men came to resent their officers, and the whole scheme of a citizen army showed signs of going to pieces.
    For Paine, those early summer days were leisurely and almost carefree. He had money enough for the first time in his life; his lodgings cost little, and a few shillings a day more than provided for him. His reputation with the magazine gave him enough of a name for him to sell an article here and there, and his reaction from the restrictions laid down on him by Aitken was to write quickly, purposefully, and better than ever before. He read a good deal, talked a good deal, and took to long, rambling walks along the river front. The Pennsylvania countryside, so like yet so different from England, fascinated him, and he would wander out into the hills, put up for the night at the stone house of some Dutch farmer, smoke a pipe, drink good homemade beer, and argue about everything from crops to government. With working-men he was able to drop the chip from his shoulder, and he, to whom good speech came with such difficulty, lapsed with ease into the broad Pennsylvania country drawl.
    One day, hot and tired, he climbed over a stile into a farmyard where a buxom, fair-haired girl of twenty or twenty-one was drawing the buttermilk off her churn. “Could I have some?” Paine asked, and she poured some into a wooden mug and laughed at the way it ran from the corners of his mouth.
    â€œAh, you’re a dry one,” she said.
    â€œCan I pay you?”
    She laughed again and asked him whether he had come up out of Philadelphia.
    â€œAll the way,” he said proudly. It was a good twelve miles, and only here in America had he learned the deep pleasure of walking.
    â€œYou don’t look like a walker.”
    â€œNo—”
    â€œWhat do you do?”
    He told her he was a writer, and she smiled at him quizzically, as if a writer were the strangest thing that had ever come her way. Then, as easily and inoffensively as she had made his acquaintance, she dropped it and went back to her butter-making as if he had never existed, running off the milk and lifting the rich white butter out of the churn, molding it like clay in her strong freckled hands. Paine, comfortable, quite rested now, sprawled in the shade of a tree, entranced by the wonderful pattern the sun and the leaves made on his dusty clothes, stretched out his legs, drank his milk, and watched her beat the butter on the board. The farm was evidently a prosperous one, the fieldstone house square and solid as a fortress, the barn half stone, half timber, strong hand-hewn beams jutting from under the eaves. They had had their first haying, and the sweet-smelling stuff was piled in great heaps out on the fields and, beyond, the corn and oats were coming up as