1634: The Ram Rebellion: Section Seventeen

COMMON SENSE

by

Virginia DeMarce

December 1632: Frankenwinheim, Franconia

    “Of course no one is happy. Why would anyone be happy?”

    Old Kaethe sniffed as she poured some very thin beer for her husband, Rudolph Vulpius. The wife of the head of Frankenwinheim’s village council doubling in her role as the wife of Frankenwinheim’s tavern keeper.

    Kaethe gave her husband a toothless smile. He had been a good catch forty years before, when they married. Even the fact that his family had at some point Latinized the name from Fuchs to Vulpius indicated that Rudolph had some pretensions to social standing in the village. All things considered, he’d stayed a good catch throughout the four decades that followed the wedding.

    “It will be hard for these ‘up-timers’ to be worse than the Swedes were last winter.” He smacked his stein down on the table with a thump.

    That seemed to be the only consensus the village had reached so far.

    Constantin Ableidinger, the school teacher, tipped back precariously on his three-legged stool. He was a stocky man, bull-necked, broad shouldered, with straight black hair, brown eyes, and a dark olive complexion. “When do you expect Tobias to get back from Bamberg?”

    “Today, perhaps. He’s a reliable boy.” The mayor was justifiably proud of his oldest grandson.

    “If we’re lucky, he’ll bring more information. I sent some money with him, to buy pamphlets and newspapers for sale. We shouldn’t just read the free things that the up-timers are handing out.”

    The mayor frowned. “Das Erfolgreiche Dorf,” he snorted. “Why do we need foreigners to tell us how to make a village successful? We could make our village successful without their advice. Which, I would like to point out, we never asked for. We know what we need. In fact, before the damned war, we had most of it. A bell in our church tower. Now melted down by the soldiers. A bridge across the creek. Now with its timbers taken for firewood by the soldiers. A stone-lined ditch from the spring on the hill, so we had water here and the boys and girls didn’t have to spend half the day going up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Which we can probably have again, once we get the ditch cleared out. They ruined that just for the meanness of it.”

    “At least we have the free pamphlets,” Ableidinger pointed out. “When the Swedes burned the school house last winter, they burned most of the books we had with it. The ones that weren’t in my cottage, anyway. So I’m using these ‘hand-outs’ for the children to read. Some of them are pretty good. The one they call Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung is the best, I think. Apparently these up-timers have an organization called a ‘grange’ that’s been publishing this weekly newspaper for farmers for almost a year up in Thuringia. We’ve only gotten a few issues, so far. Mostly old ones. It has articles on farming, of course, but also woodcuts and jokes. Stories for fathers to read to their families in the evenings.”

    The village pastor frowned. “Very few of them are edifying.” Otto Schaeffer didn’t find many things to be edifying, once the members of his flock had completed their perusal of Luther’s Shorter Catechism. Which, he thought, they should peruse much more regularly than most of them did.

    Ableidinger shook his head. “They aren’t biblical or classical. But some of them are really funny. Especially the woodcuts, the ‘cartoons.’ One of the issues introduced ‘Peter Baufaellig.’ He makes me think that maybe we’ll be able to understand these up-timers after all. The introduction said that there were woodcuts about him in a newspaper about farming up-time. The head of this ‘grange’ read about this ‘Peter Tumbledown’ when he was a child. Every village has a man like that now. I guess every village still had one then. The one who doesn’t oil his harness, who lets his hinges rust, who doesn’t fix the leak before something inside is ruined.”

    “Materialistic,” the pastor proclaimed.

    “Fixing things that need fixing fits into ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ Ableidinger said stubbornly.

    Kaethe frowned. She, along with most of the women, thought the village was lucky to have Ableidinger as its teacher, even if he wasn’t local. His family had been Lutheran refugees out of Austria who had settled up around Coburg. He wasn’t an easy man, but he kept the children disciplined and, most of the time, interested. That wasn’t easy. Energetic and vigorous, at least when the melancholy didn’t seize him. Moody, when it did. In that case, there wasn’t much to be done except wait it out. And feed the boy, of course, if his father forgot to. Matthias was a good boy, well worth a few bowls of soup or porridge.

    Kaethe knew that Pastor Schaeffer wasn’t as pleased as Frankenwinheim’s mothers and grandmothers were. She also knew one main reason why. It wasn’t just that the teacher — who was, of course, also the organist back before the soldiers had smashed the organ, as well as the sexton and the clerk for the village council, since no one could reasonably expect a man to survive on what a village schoolteacher earned, much less feed a family — had lived in the village for years before the new pastor came and knew the people better. It was that he had been to the university at Jena, just like the pastor. He had finished the arts curriculum and started to study theology before he was thrown out for getting a baker’s daughter pregnant and marrying her.

    She shook her head. Rudolph kept saying mildly that this was the young pastor’s first job and he was still full of himself and all of his book-learning. Rudolph argued that Pastor Schaeffer would season all right if they just put up with him for a while.

    She sort of doubted it. Ableidinger, who was fifteen years older than his new supervisor, was sure that he knew just as much and probably more. He didn’t hesitate to say so in public, either. She moved over to the window, pulling back one of the wooden shutters that kept out the winter air, hoping to find a distraction in what was left of the winter daylight that would head off another dispute between God’s representatives on earth — or, at least, between God’s representatives in Frankenwinheim.

    It didn’t help that Pastor Schaeffer so strongly disapproved of Ableidinger’s marriage. The pastor was still unmarried. He had heard all about the scandal when he was studying in Jena — a Professor Lenz had told him all about it. He still disapproved strongly, even though the poor woman had been dead for five years now.

    Kaethe shook her head. Maybe the pastor had skipped over, “Let the dead bury their dead.”

    Today, she was lucky. “Tobias is coming,” she said. “And it looks like his rucksack is full.”

 

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    “It’s a new one.” Vulpius picked up Die Moderne Landwirtschaft, which Tobias had shaken out onto the table in front of his grandfather. “Modern Agriculture, no less. Our new governors must be setting out to make every printing press in Bamberg profitable.”

    Ableidinger moved over to stand at the shutter Kaethe had opened, sorting through a package of pamphlets that he had ordered from Wuerzburg. That was where the new governors of Franconia had set up the center of their administration, so he thought that the most important publications were likely to be printed there — not in Bamberg, which was just a regional center, if he understood the newspaper right.

    The stack wasn’t as big as he would have liked it to be. It was going to be another grim winter. If food was scarce and prices went up, he had to keep some kind of a reserve if he was going to feed his son and himself. He could afford a few short items and broadsides, but he could not risk buying expensive books. Not this year, no matter how glum it made him. Winter was a glum time in the best of years, with the days so short. Glum. Grim. The only comfort was having something to read.

    So the small size of the package that Tobias had been able to buy was discouraging. He picked up the first. Der Gesunde Menschenverstand. Below, the subtitle read, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” Translated into German, with an Explanation of Unfamiliar Terms.

    He frowned. The first unfamiliar term was “common sense.” He had never heard of something called gesunder Menschenverstand. “Healthy human understanding?” He thumbed through the foreword. The translator had considered using schlichte Vernunft as an alternative translation before settling on the one he chose.

    “Simple reason?”

    He had just begun to lose himself in reading the pamphlet when Rudolph Vulpius started to laugh. “Here, Pastor Schaeffer. You being named a shepherd, here’s one for you.” Vulpius tossed an issue of Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung, one that hadn’t previously reached Frankenwinheim, across the rough boards of the table.

    Schaeffer read the page, the expression on his face becoming grimmer with each line.

    Stuffing Common Sense into his belt, Ableidinger came back to the table, looking over the pastor’s shoulder. It was the entertainment page. At the top, large type proclaimed, The latest from Grantville. Just below, on the left, was a woodcut of a scruffy but very well-endowed ram. The title was Schade, Brillo! Schade! “Shame on you, Brillo! Shame!”

    “What’s a Brillo?” Old Kaethe asked. She was looking over the pastor’s other shoulder with no more deference to his status than Ableidinger showed.

    “Maybe it explains it somewhere in the story,” Vulpius said.

    Pastor Schaeffer was turning red and starting to sputter.

    “For the sake of your health,” Ableidinger said, reaching over and taking the newspaper. “It’s a fable, like Aesop. That’s classical enough.” He started to read it out loud for everyone in the tavern. His booming voice, trained in rhetoric and debate, caught the attention of even the people who didn’t pay much attention to the politics of the village or the region. “The English title of the story was Bad, Ba-a-a-ad, Brillo!”

    Everyone knew animal fables. Nobody had trouble figuring out that Brillo, whatever a Brillo might be, stood for the sturdy German farmer. Nor that the merino ram stood for the rulers who made their lives difficult.

    Ableidinger was no more than half way through when Pastor Schaeffer got up and left the tavern.

    None of the rest of the audience paid any attention to his disapproval. Frankenwinheim provided him with an unruly flock.

    Kaethe pulled the shutter closed and brought in an oil lamp. “Read it again,” she ordered. “Maybe there’s something to be happy about, after all.”

    Rudolph blinked up at her. “What?”

    “The up-timers printed it, didn’t they? The plain old ordinary ram was clever enough to outwit the highly-bred one. This wasn’t smuggled in. Our new rulers — they printed a fable in which this Brillo triumphed.”

    Ableidinger grinned. “Not edifying, of course. To be properly edifying, I’m sure Pastor Schaeffer would insist that Brillo should have come to a proper insight that God the Father had established the merino ram as the representative of His secular sword on earth and deferred to the gentleram, giving him proper precedence.”

    “Teacher.” Old Kaethe rapped him on the top of the head. “That’s not respectful.”

    Ableidinger nodded. “I know.” His voice rumbled as he started reading through the fable again.

 

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    He had to read Schade, Brillo! Schade! a half-dozen times. Not that the rest of the villagers couldn’t read, but they only had one copy of the story. In any case, most people would rather hear something read out loud, with feeling and emphasis in the reader’s voice. By the time they got out of the tavern, it was full dark. Old Kaethe had given them a crock of hot broth to dunk their bread. Matthias was sleeping on his cot. The comfort in his stomach had put him right to sleep.

    The oil in the lamp wouldn’t last much longer.

    Ableidinger hadn’t been that surprised by the fable. In other issues of the weekly newspaper for farmers, the up-timers had published paragraphs of political philosophy. Sayings. Maxims. He had copied out some of them, from John Locke, from Benjamin Franklin, from Thomas Jefferson.

    But those authors were Englishmen, and they had written then, not now. If he understood properly what this Grantville city signified, they had written in a “then” that now would never happen. In a future that never would be.

    The Bible provided comfort for all tribulations. “With God, all things are possible.”

    Thus, a city from the future, too, was possible.

    Not that Pastor Schaeffer would be likely to see it that way.

    Ableidinger had been a little surprised by the fable. The other authors had written “then.” Not to mention “there.” Brillo was, most certainly, here and now. An ordinary German ram.

    Ableidinger opened Common Sense. He would make the most of this evening’s ration of oil. He didn’t have much time for reading in the daylight in winter. That was when most of his pupils spent most of their days at school, so he had to teach the lessons.

    That was his job. Teaching. Not thinking about political philosophy.

 

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    Then and now. There and here. Thomas Paine. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” How local circumstances could give rise to universal principles. “The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; . . .”

    Ableidinger frowned to himself. Looking up, he frowned at his pupils, directing the older ones back to doing simple addition on their slates.

    Did the up-timers who would be administering Franconia agree with Paine?

    If so, why were they working for the king of Sweden?

    If not, why had they published this pamphlet in German?

    He continued reading, fascinated by the distinction that Paine made between society and government, the first produced by men’s wants and promoting their happiness; the second produced by men’s wickedness and restraining their vices. Society was a blessing; government a necessary evil. “The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”

    Hey, this was a good one! “ . . .the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

    For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

    Ableidinger was very happy to discover that the new administration — or, at least, the men who had founded the country from which the new administrators came — had a clear and distinct picture in their minds of the way a village ought to work. Whether or not it did, of course, was another question.

    Looking up at the children, he told them to stop working and listen while he read to them.

    None of them objected.

    He read through Paine’s description of a small number of persons, settling a new land and, in a condition of “natural liberty,” establishing a society by cooperating with one another.

    “A thousand motives will excite them thereto . . .”

    He assigned the older children the task of thinking of just ten of those motives for establishing a society in the wilderness. Each of them should talk with his or her parents and bring the list to school the next day. They would combine all the lists and then compare them to the reasons that Thomas Paine gave for this action.

    They did combine the lists. Then he had each child copy Paine’s reasons and take them home to their parents.

    The pastor, when he heard about this assignment, was not pleased. He said so to the mayor.

    “Surely,” Old Kaethe asked, “you would not deny that God’s children should endeavor to assist one another? Charity is a virtue.”

    “When you put it that way . . .” Schaeffer turned and went back to his house.

    At the school, Ableidinger was still proceeding through Common Sense. Once Paine’s hypothetical emigrants had established a society, because they began to “relax in their duty and attachment to each other,” they reached a point at which “this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.”

    Ah. How remarkable! A lot of what Paine wrote was specific to the circumstances of England and England’s handling of its colonies in America. That was specific to time and place. Ableidinger skipped over this in school. It wasn’t something the children really needed to learn, and he did have to find time for the regular lessons. England was far away and every educated man in the Germanies knew that the place was terribly backwards. Besides, if Thomas Paine had believed that the “English constitution” was complex, one could only assume that he had never made a study of the Holy Roman Empire.

    Some things, though, were worth emphasizing. Paine even knew of the ancient custom of the villages in many parts of the Germanies according to which the council met under a tree.

    Some convenient tree will afford them a State House, under the branches of which the whole Colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of Regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat.

    Paine didn’t seem to realize that it ought to be a linden tree. But then, there was a limit to what one could expect of foreigners. Perhaps there were no lindens in England or this far-away America.

    As Ableidinger taught Paine to his students, he started sending out circular letters to the teachers in other villages in the vicinity urging them to obtain their own copies of the pamphlet and helpfully enclosing the lesson plans he was developing for teaching it.

    The most complicated one dealt with the increase in size of the imaginary colony, which required that village-style government be supplemented by a system of elected representatives.

    Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, 'tis right.

    The “simple voice of nature and reason.”

    Der gesunde Menschenverstand. Common Sense.

    Even in those sections specific to England, there were some good diagnoses of the general problems and occasional sentences from which general principles could be derived.

    Ableidinger found Paine’s analysis of scriptural principles to be not only excellent, but also quite in keeping with many of the assertions made at the time of the Peasant War in 1525 — the one in which the farmers’ hope for liberty had been so betrayed by the leaders of the new Reformation. He looked at the piece of paper on the table in front of him. Yes, Lutheran though he was himself, he would write it. In this matter, Luther had betrayed the Germans’ hopes for greater liberty.

    Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred Majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust!

    Ableidinger laughed out loud. After what Franconia had suffered from the invasion of the Swede and his allies, he could only agree with Paine’s statement that, “Absolute governments, (tho' the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs; know likewise the remedy; and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures.”

 

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January 1633: Frankenwinheim, Franconia

    The agricultural newspapers and pamphlets kept coming. Almost every weekly edition of Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung had a new Brillo story. It was worth sending Tobias to get the new issue every week.

    Ableidinger read every Brillo story out loud in the tavern. According to what Tobias heard, there were many villages in Franconia in which someone read the Brillo story out loud every week. He was getting a lot of replies to his circular letters. It was breaking his budget to pay the postage when they arrived.

    Other villages were also reading Common Sense. A printer in Bamberg sent a letter requesting the right to print an edition of a thousand copies of Ableidinger’s abbreviated version with annotations for teaching its principles in village schools.

    “There’s time,” he said to Rudolph Vulpius. “It won’t hurt the children to miss school for just a few days, no matter what Pastor Schaeffer says. I need to go to Bamberg.”

    “Need?” Vulpius gave him the kind of look Ableidinger was accustomed to giving his own pupils.

    “Well . . . I want to meet the printer who will be publishing my pamphlet. That’s important. I want to get some idea of how many other pamphlets and books are being published, better than I can from here. I can walk down with Tobias, if you will just put on your other hat as the head of the parish’s board of elders and get me permission to go.”

    “That’s important,” Old Kaethe said, “but it’s not the most important thing. Rudolph should go with you. A couple of other men with him, and a few men from other villages around. We’re on the edge of things, here. We need to just look at these up-timers, these men from Grantville.”

    “We?” the mayor asked.

    “I did think,” she said, “that I might come along. See what kind of Germans they have surrounded themselves with. See how they are doing things in more important towns and places.”

    Vulpius nodded. “Watch them. For the time will come, perhaps, when we have to test them. You read their words, Constantin. Think, though. It’s going to be more important for us to find out if their actions match their words.”

 

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    So, not long after Christmas, they went to Bamberg, to the press of Frau Else Kronacher. She did, as promised, pay Ableidinger for his manuscript. Not that she had any obligation to pay him, she pointed out, but the convenience of working from it all at once rather than chasing around Franconia after copies of his various circular letters and piecing them together in the proper order for her daughter Martha to set in type made it worth her while.

    Of course, the woman hadn’t lost much. Ableidinger turned around and spent half of the money on other books and pamphlets that her press had published. He spent most of the rest of it on warm clothing for Matthias and treats to give his pupils on the festival of Three Kings. Some, however, he reserved for future postage.

 

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    “What did you think?” Old Kaethe stomped her cold feet on the ground. The weather was worse on the way home than it had been when they left Frankenwinheim.

    Ableidinger pulled the collar of his cloak up. “Paine was certainly an optimist when he wrote, ‘I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.’ Still . . . If the up-timers can simplify the system under which we poor Germans have to live . . .”

    Kaethe frowned. “Why do the up-timers have to do it? Why can’t the Germans do it themselves? Like the ram?”

    Ableidinger smiled. In spite of the weather, he had never been so happy in midwinter. Most years, midwinter was glum. Grim. Most years, he spent hours praying for the solstice to come, that the turn of the season might start to bring more light to his day. But he had been so busy that he scarcely noticed the passing of the shortest day of the year.

    “According to their principles, if the people of Franconia set out to simplify their government, the up-timers should be obliged to refrain from interfering with the process.”

    Vulpius nodded. “It would, after all, be expensive for them to interfere. Interference means soldiers. Soldiers cost money.”

    “They certainly cost a lot more money than circular letters and pamphlets,” Tobias said.

    Ableidinger agreed. Not that postage was cheap. Common sense all by itself reminded a person of that.