Mankind's Friend

TOM PAINE, FRIEND OF MANKIND--Hesketh Pearson--Harper ($3).

When 37-year-old Tom Paine landed in America in November 1774 having failed in England as staymaker, sailor, schoolmaster, excise officer, husband, no man could have predicted the extent of the fame or the abuse that awaited him. Ranked by his contemporaries with Washington and Jefferson, he lived to see popular opinion of himself summed up by his onetime enemy, Journalist William Cobbett: "Men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by one single monosyllable--Paine." Mothers threatened their young, "If you're not good. Tom Paine will get you." A century later Theodore Roosevelt testified that officially it was still open season on Paine when he referred to him as that "filthy little atheist." Author Pearson is not the first modern biographer to adopt the thesis that Paine's notoriety had its source in political rather than religious causes, but in his Tom Paine he gives more room than his predecessors have to the part played by Paine's personal makeup in turning him against Congress, his onetime heroes Washington, Burke, Robespierre, Napoleon.

Appointed Secretary to the Committee for Foreign Affairs by Congress, Paine's first run-in with Congress occurred when lukewarm members resented his interference with Tory maneuvers. His second disagreement was more serious, lost him his job. Under a secret understanding with France, Louis XVI turned over to the wily courtier Beaumarchais 1.000,000 livres, which was to reach America in gold and gunpowder. But when the commercial agent for Congress, Silas Deane, arrived in Paris to buy munitions, Beaumarchais said nothing about the money, arranged instead through a dummy company of his own to exchange munitions for tobacco. Paine refused to believe Deane's story, called him a "plodding, plotting, cringing mercenary," and Congress got rid of Paine to avoid exposing France's breach of treaty with England over the loan.

After the war, Paine was passed up for diplomatic appointment, settled down on his farm in New Rochelle to experiment with bridge models, which he decided to take to England for a hearing. Fifteen years passed before he got back to the U. S. He quarrelled with Burke over the aims of the French Revolution then in progress, wrote The Rights of Man, barely escaped to France when Pitt charged him with sedition.

France started him off a popular hero, elected him a Deputy, but he became suspect after he protested the King's execution. U. S. Ambassador Gouverneur Morris, paying off old grudges, was chiefly responsible for Paine's ten months in prison, his close escape from the guillotine, but it was Washington whom Paine blamed, accusing him of sacrificing their friendship for a treaty with the hated English. It pleased Paine when Napoleon praised The Rights of Man, said to him, "A statue of gold ought to be erected to you in every city in the universe." But when he discovered the wily Frenchman merely wished him to lead an armed raid against the English, he turned on Napoleon his greatest barrage of invective yet.

Back in America he aided Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase, tinkered with his bridge models, fell out with his few remaining friends, suffered his worst blow when the election-supervisors at New Rochelle barred him from voting, called him an alien. He moved to Greenwich Village, died there while fighting off the churchmen who flocked to his bedside hoping to save the blackest soul in U. S. history. Though he asked to be buried in a Quaker cemetery, not even the Quakers would receive him. Repentant Journalist Cobbett dug up Paine's bones, intending to transplant them to Liverpool, then--according to Author Pearson--absentmindedly mislaid them somewhere.

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