The Trouble with Tom Read Online Free Page A

abominations. Exiled to Philadelphia and dismayed to find slaveowning there too, he'd quit town in disgust and lived as a hermit in a cave outside the city limits, refusing to wear or eat anything that had involved the suffering of an animal. Quaker slaveholders probably fancied themselves rid of him. They were not: attired in a biblical beard and a flowing white overcoat, Lay would sweep into Philadelphia meetinghouses to scourge the Friends throughout the 1750s. "In the sight of God, you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart!" roared the furious elder who materialized in the midst of one meeting, wielded a knife on himself, and showered bystanders with fake blood. For his troubles, Lay was physically thrown into the gutter on Market Street. He refused to pick himself up from the muck, preferring to lie there as a reproach to the Friends as they left the meetinghouse. But he still entertained one occasional visitor in his cave-Franklin.
    And perhaps it was that same idealistic quality that the now-elderly Franklin saw in the unemployed fellow who held forth in London coffeehouses. Absurdly, this newest protege simply had a notion of going to Philadelphia to start a young ladies' finishing school. Ah, but then Franklin himself had once nearly thrown it all over to become a London swimming instructor. Pain, too, was marked out for greater things-he just did not know what yet. After a job at a local newspaper, where he reinvented himself by changing his name slightly and penning editorials that excoriated the very same inequalities Lay once had, Paine finally found his life's mission in writing a pamphlet.
    The pamphlet.
    In the will he'd scrawled in Ryder's house on Herring Street, Paine carefully included instructions for his tombstone, a simple headstone with his name, his dates, and an epitaph of just four words: Author of Common Sense. A single pamphlet, written when he was a nobody, published anonymously; of the thousands of pages he had published in his life, for all the tumult and agony he had undergone, it all came back to that one act. Understand this and you understand my life.
    Why? True, Common Sense sold one hundred and twenty thousand copies in its first three months after January 10, 1776-and upwards of five hundred thousand copies in the next three years. In those days of expensive paper, each copy was passed around. America's population was only about 2.5 million, many of whom could not even read, so readership of this pamphlet was virtually universal among the literate. It was a feat unequaled by any document in the Colonies save perhaps the Bible. It brought forth a frenzied response by Loyalist propagandists, desperate to stanch the wounds he'd made, but it was already too late. Paine had changed the very terms of the debate. 'Without the pen of the author of Common Sense," John Adams later mused, "the word of Washington would have been raised in vain." This was no small admission coming from Adams, since he'd initially condemned Common Sense as "a poor ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass."
    But . . . Who cares now? Why should this still matter, this tax and sovereignty polemic from centuries ago?Lots of political writers have written lots of bestsellers, and a few have even managed to tear the nation from its moorings. Yet we do not still read Rowan Hinton Helper's Impending Crisis of the South. So why this one: what made it special? Why make this one pamphlet the epitaph on his grave? Perhaps the clue lies in plain sight. Though Common Sense was a forty-six-page pamphlet, its animating spirit may be found within its first sentence: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right." Forget what you thought was wrong, Paine says, and forget what you thought was right: produce proof that they are so. And if there is one word that expresses what the achievements of the Enlightenment are about, it is that one. Proof:
    Reader, just