"—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."