Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. II by Moncure Conway
THE
LIFE OF THOMAS PAINE
WITH A HISTORY OF HIS LITERARY, POLITICAL
AND RELIGIOUS CAREER IN AMERICA
FRANCE, AND ENGLAND
BY
MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY
AUTHOR OF "OMITTED CHAPTERS OF HISTORY DISCLOSED
IN THE LIFE AND PAPERS OF EDMUND RANDOLPH,"
"GEORGE WASHINGTON AND MOUNT VERNON,"
"WASHINGTON'S RULES OF CIVILITY," ECT.
TO WHICH IS ADDED AS NOTESTHE “LAST GLEANINGS, HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL” FROM THE AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTIONS OF VOLUME III (1895) & IV (1896) OF
“THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS PAINE”
VOLUME II.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
The Knicherbocker Press
1893
COPYRIGHT, 1892
BY
MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
THE LIFE OF THOMAS PAINE.
Footnotes at the end of the Volume
CHAPTER I.
"KILL THE KING, BUT NOT THE MAN."
[1793]DUMAS’ hero, Dr. Gilbert (in “Ange Pitou”), an idealization of Paine, interprets his hopes and horrors on the opening of the fateful year 1793. Dr. Gilbert’s pamphlets had helped to found liberty in the New World, but sees that it may prove the germ of total ruin to the Old World.
“A new world,” repeated Gilbert; “that is to say, a vast open space, a clear table to work upon, – no laws, but no abuses; no ideas, but no prejudices1. In France, thirty thousand square leagues of territory for thirty millions of people; that is to say, should the space be equally divided, scarcely room for a cradle or a grave for each. Out yonder, in America, two hundred thousand square leagues for three millions of people; frontiers which are ideal, for they border on the desert, which is to say, immensity. In those two hundred thousand leagues, navigable rivers, having a course of a thousand leagues; virgin forests, of which God alone knows the limits, – that is to say, all the elements of life, of civilization, and of a brilliant future. Oh, how easy it is, Billot, when a man is called Lafayette, and is accustomed to wield a sword; when a man is called Washington, and is accustomed to reflect deeply, – how easy is it to combat against walls of wood, of earth, of stone, of human flesh! But when, instead of founding, it is necessary to destroy; when we see in the old order things that we are obliged to attack, walls of bygone, crumbling ideas; and that behind the ruins even of these walls crowds of people and of interests still take refuge; when, after having found the idea, we find that in order to make the people adopt it, it will be necessary perhaps to decimate that people, from the old who remember to the child who has still to learn; from the recollection which is the monument to the instinct that is its germ – then, oh then, Billot, it is a task that will make all shudder who can see beneath the horizon . . . . I shall, however, persevere, for although I see obstacles, I can perceive the end; and that end is splendid, Billot. It is not the liberty of France alone that I dream of; it is the liberty of the whole world. It is not the physical equality; it is equality before the law, – equality of rights. It is not only the fraternity of our own citizens, but of all nations . . . . Forward, then, and over the heaps of our dead bodies may one day march the generations of which this boy here is in the advanced guard!”
Though Dr. Gilbert has been in the Bastille, though he barely escapes the bullet of a revolutionist, he tries to unite the throne and the people. So, as we have seen, did Paine struggle until the King took flight, and, over his own signature, branded all his pledges as extorted lies. Henceforth for the King personally he has no respect; yet the whole purpose of his life is now to save, that of the prisoner. Besides his humane horror of capital punishment, especially in a case which involves the heads of thousands, Paine foresees Nemesis fashioning her wheels in every part of Europe, and her rudder across the ocean, – where America beholds in Louis XVI. her deliverer.
Paine’s outlawry, announced by Kersaint in Convention, January 1st, was more eloquent for wrath than he for clemency. Under such menaces the majority for sparing Louis shrank with the New Year; French pride arose, and with Danton was eager to defy despots by tossing to them the head of a king. Poor Paine found his comrades retreating. What would a knowledge of the French tongue have been worth to this leading republican of the world, just then the one man sleeplessly seeking to save a King’s life! He could not plead with his enraged republicans, who at length over powered even Brissot, so far as to draw him into the fatal plan of voting for the King’s death, coupled with submission to the verdict of the people. Paine saw that there was at the moment no people, but only an infuriated clan. He was now defending a forlorn hope, but he struggled with a heroism that would have commanded the homage of Europe had not its courts been also clans. He hit on a scheme which he hoped might; in that last extremity, save the real revolution from a suicidal inhumanity. It was the one statesmanlike proposal of the time that the King should be held as a hostage for the peaceful behavior of other kings, and, when their war on France had ceased, banished to the United States.
On January 15th, before the vote on the King’s punishment was put, Paine gave his manuscript address to the president: debate closed before it could be read, and it was printed. He argued that the Assembly, in bringing back Louis when he had abdicated and fled, was the more guilty; and against his transgressions it should be remembered that by his aid the shackles of America were broken.
“Let then those United States be the guard and the asylum of Louis Capet2. There, in the future, remote from the miseries and crimes of royalty, he may learn, from the constant presence of public prosperity, that the true system of government consists not in monarchs, but in fair, equal, and honorable representation. In recalling this circumstance, and submitting this proposal, I consider myself a citizen of both countries. I submit it as an American who feels the debt of gratitude he owes to every Frenchman. I submit it as a man, who, albeit an adversary of kings, forgets not that they are subject to human frailties. I support my proposal as a citizen of the French Republic, because it appears to me the best and most politic measure that can be adopted. As far as my experience in public life extends, I have ever observed that the great mass of people are always just, both in their intentions and their object; but the true method of attaining such purpose does not always appear at once. The English nation had groaned under the Stuart despotism. Hence Charles I. was executed; but Charles II. was restored to all the powers his father had lost. Forty years later the same family tried to re-establish their oppression; the nation banished the whole race from its territories. The remedy was effectual; the Stuart family sank into obscurity, merged itself in the masses, and is now extinct.”
He reminds the Convention that the king had two brothers out of the country who might naturally desire his death: the execution of the king might make them presently plausible pretenders to the throne, around whom their foreign enemies would rally: while the man recognized by foreign powers as the rightful monarch of France was living there could be no such pretender.
“It has already been proposed to abolish the penalty of death, and it is with infinite satisfaction that I recollect the humane and excellent oration pronounced by Robespierre on the subject, in the constituent Assembly. Monarchical governments have trained the human race to sanguinary punishments, but the people should not follow the examples of their oppressors in such vengeance. As France has been the first of European nations to abolish royalty, let her also be the first to abolish the punishment of death, and to find out a milder and more effectual substitute.”
This was admirable art. Under shelter of Robespierre’s appeal against the death penalty, the “Mountain,”3 could not at the moment break the force of Paine’s plea by reminding the Convention of his Quaker sentiments. It will be borne in mind that up to this time Robespierre was not impressed, nor Marat possessed, by the homicidal demon. Marat had felt for Paine a sort of contemptuous kindness, and one day privately said to him: “It is you, then, who believe in a republic; you have too much sense to believe in such a dream.” Robespierre, according to Lamartine, “affected for the cosmopolitan radicalism of Paine the respect of a neophite for ideas not understood.” Both leaders now suspected that Paine had gone over to the “Brissotins,” as the Girondists were beginning to be called. However, the Brissotins, though a majority, had quailed before the ferocity with which the Jacobins had determined on the king’s death. M. Taine declares that the victory of the minority in this case was the familiar one of reckless violence over the more civilized the wild beast over the tame. Louis Blanc denies that the Convention voted, as one of them said, under poignards; but the signs of fear are unmistakable. Vergniaud had declared it an insult for arty one to suppose he would vote for the king’s death, but he voted for it. Villette was threatened with death if he did not vote for that of the king. Sieyes, who had attacked Paine for republicanism, voted death. “What,” he afterward said, “what were the tribute of my glass of wine in that torrent of brandy?” But Paine did not withhold his cup of cold water. When his name was called he cried out: “I vote for the detention of Louis till the end of the war, and after that his perpetual banishment.” He spoke his well prepared vote in French, and may have given courage to others. For even under poignards – the most formidable being liability to a charge of royalism – the vote had barely gone in favor of death4.
The fire-breathing Mountain felt now that its supremacy was settled. It had learned its deadly art of conquering a thinking majority by recklessness. But suddenly another question was sprung upon the Convention: Shall the execution be immediate, or shall there be delay? The Mountain groans and hisses as the question is raised, but the dictation had not extended to this point, and the question must be iscussed. Here is one more small chance for Paine’s poor royal client. Can the execution only be postponed it will probably never be executed. Unfortunately Marat, whose thirst for the King’s blood is almost cannibalistic, can read on Paine’s face his elation. He realizes that this American, with Washington behind him, has laid before the Convention a clear and consistent scheme for utilizing the royal prisoner. The king’s neck under a suspended knife, it will rest with the foreign enemies of France whether it shall fall or not; while the magnanimity of France and its respect for American gratitude will prevail. Paine, then, must be dealt with somehow in this new debate about delay.
He might, indeed, have been dealt with summarily had not the Moniteur done him an opportune service; on January 17th and 18th it printed Paine’s unspoken argument for mercy, along with Erskine’s speech at his trial in London, and the verdict. So on the 19th, when Paine entered the Convention, it was with the prestige not only of one outlawed by Great Britain for advocating the Rights of Man, but of a representative of the best Englishmen and their principles. It would be vain to assail the author’s loyalty to the Republic. That he would speak that day was certain, for on the morrow (20th) the final vote was to be taken. The Mountain could not use on Paine their weapon against Girondins; they could not accuse the author of the “Rights of Man” of being royalist. When he had mounted the tribune, and the clerk (Bancal, Franklin’s friend) was beginning to read his speech, Marat cried, “I submit that Thomas Paine is incompetent to vote on this question; being a Quaker his religious principles are opposed to the death-penalty.” There was great confusion for a time. The anger of the Jacobins was extreme, says, Guizot, and “they refused to listen to the speech of Paine, the American, till respect for his courage gained him a hearing:”5 Demands for freedom of speech gradually subdued the interruptions, and the secretary proceeded:
“Very sincerely do I regret the Convention’s vote of yesterday for death. I have the advantage of some experience; it is near twenty years that I have been engaged in the cause of liberty, having contributed something to it in the revolution of the United States of America. My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know by experience that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these two principles, under all circumstances. I know that the public mind of France, and particularly that of Paris, has been heated and irritated by the dangers to which they have been exposed; but could we carry our thoughts into the future, when the dangers are ended, and the irritations forgotten, what to-day seems an act of justice may then appear an act of vengeance. [Murmurs.] My anxiety for the cause of France has become for the moment concern for its honor. If, on my return to America, I should employ myself on a history of the French Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors dictated by humanity, than one inspired by a justice too severe. I voted against an appeal to the people, because it appeared to me that the Convention was needlessly wearied on that point; but I so voted in the hope that this Assembly would pronounce against death, and for the same punishment that the nation would have voted, at least in my opinion, that is, for reclusion during the war and banishment thereafter. That is the punishment most efficacious, because it includes the whole family at once, and none other can so operate. I am still against the appeal to the primary assemblies, because there is a better method. This Convention has been elected to form a Constitution, which will be submitted to the primary assemblies. After its acceptance a necessary consequence will be an election, and another Assembly. We cannot suppose that the present Convention will last more than five or six months. The choice of new deputies will express the, national opinion on the propriety or impropriety of your sentence, with as much efficacy as if those primary assemblies had been consulted on it. As the duration of our functions here cannot be long, it is a part of our duty to consider the interests of those who shall replace us. If by any act of ours the number of the nation’s enemies shall be needlessly increased, and that of its friends diminished, – at a time when the finances may be more strained than to-day, – we should not be justifiable for having thus unnecessarily heaped obstacles in the path of our successors. Let us therefore not be precipitate in our decisions.
“France has but one ally – the United States of America. That is the only nation that can furnish France with naval provisions, for the kingdoms of northern Europe are, or soon will be, at war with her. It happens, unfortunately, that the person now under discussion is regarded in America as a deliverer of their country. I can assure you that his execution will there spread universal sorrow, and it is in your power not thus to wound the feelings of your ally. Could I speak the French language I would descend to your bar, and in their name become your petitioner to respite the execution of the sentence on Louis.”
Here were loud murmurs from the “Mountain,” answered with demands for liberty of opinion. Thuriot sprang to his feet crying, “This is not the language of Thomas Paine.” Marat mounted the tribune and asked Paine some questions, apparently in English, then descending he said to the Assembly in French: “I denounce the interpreter, and I maintain that such is not the opinion of Thomas Paine. It is a wicked and faithless translation.”6 These words, audacious as mendacious, caused a tremendous uproar. Garran came to the rescue of the frightened clerk, declaring that he had read the original, and the translation was correct. Paine stood silent and calm during the storm. The clerk proceeded:
“Your Executive Committee will nominate an ambassador to Philadelphia; my sincere wish is that he may announce to America that the National Convention of France, out of pure friendship to America, has consented to respite Louis. That people, your only ally, have asked you by my vote to delay the execution.
“Ah, citizens, give not the tyrant of England the triumph of seeing the man perish on a scaffold who helped my dear brothers of America to break his chains!”
At the conclusion of this speech Marat “launched himself into the middle of the hall” and cried out that Paine had “voted against the punishment of death because he was a Quaker.” Paine replied, “I voted against it both morally and politically.”
Had the vote been taken that day perhaps Louis might have escaped. Brissot, shielded from charges of royalism by Paine’s republican fame, now strongly supported his cause. “A cruel precipitation,” he cried, “may alienate our friends in England, Ireland, America. Take care! The opinion of European peoples is worth to you armies!” But all this only brought out the Mountain’s particular kind of courage; they were ready to defy the world – Washington included – in order to prove that a King’s neck was no more than any other man’s. Marat’s clan – the “Nihilists” of the time, whose strength was that they stopped at nothing – had twenty-four hours to work in; they surrounded the Convention next day with a mob howling for “justice!” Fifty-five members were absent; of the 690 present a majority of seventy decided that Louis XVI. should die within twenty-four hours.
A hundred years have passed since that tragedy of poor Louis; graves have given up their dead; secrets of the hearts that then played their part are known. The world can now judge between England’s Outlaw and England’s King of that day. For it is established, as we have seen, both by English and French archives, that while Thomas Paine was toiling night and day to save the life of Louis that life lay in the hand of the British Ministry. Some writers question the historic truth of the offer made by Danton, but none can question the refusal of intercession, urged by Fox and others at a time when (as Count d’Estaing told Morris) the Convention was ready to give Pitt the whole French West Indies to keep him quiet. It was no doubt with this knowledge that Paine declared from the tribune that George III. Would triumph in the execution of the King who helped America to break England’s chains. Brissot also knew it when with weighed words he reported for his Committee (January 12th): “The grievance of the British Cabinet against France is not that Louis is in judgment, but that Thomas Paine wrote `The Rights of Man.’” “The militia were armed,” says Louis Blanc, “in the south-east of England troops received order to march to London, the meeting of Parliament was advanced forty days, the Tower was reinforced by a new garrison, in fine there was unrolled a formidable preparation of war against – Thomas Paine’s book on the Rights of Man!”7
Incredible as this may appear the debates in the House of Commons, on which it is fairly founded, would be more incredible were they not duly reported in the “Parliamentary History.”8 In the debates on the Alien Bill, permitting the King to order any foreigner out of the country at will, on making representations to the French Convention in behalf of the life of Louis, on augmenting the military forces with direct reference to France, the recent trial of Paine was rehearsed, and it was plainly shown that the object of the government was to suppress freedom of the press by Terror. Erskine was denounced for defending Paine and for afterwards attending a meeting of the “Society of Friends of the Liberty of the Press,” to whose resolutions on Paine’s case his name was attached. Erskine found gallant defenders in the House, among them Fox, who demanded of Pitt: “Can you not prosecute Paine without an army?” Burke at this time enacted a dramatic scene. Having stated that three thousand daggers had been ordered at Birmingham by an Englishman, he drew from his pocket a dagger, cast it on the floor of the House of Commons, and cried: “That is what we are to get from an alliance with France!” Paine – Paine – Paine – was the burden laid on Pitt, who had said to Lady Hester Stanhope: “Tom Paine is quite right.” That Thomas Paine and his “Rights of Man” were the actual cause of the English insults to which their declaration of war replied was so well understood in the French Convention that its first answer to the menaces was to appoint Paine and Condorcet to write an address to the English people9.
It is noticeable that on the question whether the judgment on the King’s fate should be submitted to the people, Paine voted “No.” His belief in the right of all to representation implied distrust of the immediate voice of the masses. The King had said that if his case were referred to the people “he should be massacred.” Gouverneur Morris had heard this, and no doubt communicated it to Paine, who was in consultation with him on his plan of sending Louis to America10. Indeed, it is probable that popular suffrage would have ratified the decree. Nevertheless, it was a fair “appeal to the people” which Paine made, after the fatal verdict, in expressing to the Convention his belief that the people would not have done so. For after the decree the helplessness of the prisoner appealed to popular compassion, and on the fatal day the tide had turned. Four days after the execution the American Minister writes to Jefferson: “The greatest care was taken to prevent a concourse of people. This proves a conviction that the majority was not favorable to that severe measure. In fact the great mass of the people mourned the fate of their unhappy prince.”
To Paine the death of an “unhappy prince” was no more a subject for mourning than that of the humblest criminal – for, with whatever extenuating circumstances, a criminal he was to the republic he had sworn to administer. But the impolicy of the execution, the resentment uselessly incurred, the loss of prestige in America, were felt by Paine as a heavy blow to his cause – always the international republic. He was, however, behind the scenes enough to know that the blame rested mainly on America’s old enemy and his league of foreign courts against liberated France. The man who, when Franklin said “Where liberty is, there is my country,” answered “Where liberty is not, there is mine,” would not despair of the infant republic because of its blunders. Attributing these outbursts to maddening conspiracies around and within the new-born nation, he did not believe there could be peace in Europe so long as it was ruled by George III. He therefore set himself to the struggle, as he had done in 1776. Moreover, Paine has faith in Providence11.
At this time, it should be remembered, opposition to capital punishment was confined to very few outside of the despised sect of Quakers. In the debate three, besides Paine, gave emphatic expression to that sentiment, Manuel, Condorcet, – Robespierre! The, former, in giving his vote against death, said: “To Nature belongs the right of death. Despotism has taken it from her; Liberty will return it.” As for Robespierre, his argument was a very powerful reply to Paine, who had reminded him of the bill he had introduced into the old National Assembly for the abolition of capital punishment. He did, indeed, abhor it, he said; it was not his fault if his views had been disregarded. But why should men who then opposed him suddenly revive the claims of humanity when the penalty happened to fall upon a King? Was the penalty good enough for the people, but not for a King? If there were any exception in favor of such a punishment, it should be for a royal criminal.
This opinion of Robespierre is held by some humane men. The present writer heard from Professor Francis W. Newman – second to none in philanthropy and compassionateness – a suggestion that the death penalty should be reserved for those placed at the head of affairs who betray their trust, or set their own above the public interests to the injury of a Commonwealth.
The real reasons for the execution of the King closely resemble those of Washington for the execution of Major Andre, notwithstanding the sorrow of the country, with which the Commander sympathized. The equal nationality of the United States, repudiated by Great Britain, was in question.
To hang spies was, however illogically, a conventional usage among nations. Major Andre must die, therefore, and must be refused the soldier’s death for which he petitioned. For a like reason Europe must be shown that the French Convention is peer of their scornful Parliaments; and its fundamental principle, the equality of men, could not admit a King’s escape from the penalty which would be unhesitatingly inflicted on a “Citizen.” The King had assumed the title of Citizen, had worn the republican cockade; the apparent concession of royal inviolability, in the moment of his betrayal of the compromise made with him, could be justified only on the grounds stated by Paine, – impolicy of slaying their hostage, creating pretenders, alienating America; and the honor of exhibiting to the world, by a salient example, the Republic’s magnanimity in contrast with the cruelty of Kings.
CHAPTER II
AN OUTLAWED ENGLISH AMBASSADOR
[1793]SOON after Paine had taken his seat in the Convention, Lord Fortescue wrote to Miles, an English agent in Paris, a letter fairly expressive of the feelings, fears, and hopes of his class.
“Tom Paine is just where he ought to be – a member of the Convention of Cannibals. One would have thought it impossible that any society upon the face of the globe should have been fit for the reception of such a being until the late deeds of the National Convention have shown them to be most fully qualified. His vocation will not be complete, nor theirs either, till his head finds its way to the top of a pike, which will probably not be long first.”12
But if Paine was so fit for such a Convention, why should they behead him? The letter betrays a real perception that Paine possesses humane principles, and an English courage, which would bring him into danger. This undertone of Fortescue’s invective represented the profound confidence of Paine’s adherents in England. When tidings came of the King’s trial and execution, whatever glimpses they gained of their outlawed leader showed him steadfast as a star caught in one wave and another of that turbid tide. Many, alas, needed apologies, but Paine required none. That one Englishman, standing on the tribune for justice and humanity, amid three hundred angry Frenchmen in uproar, was as sublime a sight as Europe witnessed in those days. To the English radical the outlawry of Paine was as the tax on light, which was presently walling up London windows, or extorting from them the means of war against ideas13. The trial of Paine had elucidated nothing, except that, like Jupiter, John Bull had the thunderbolts, and Paine the arguments. Indeed, it is difficult to discover any other Englishman who at the moment pre-eminently stood for principles now proudly called English.
But Paine too presently held thunderbolts. Although his efforts to save Louis had offended the “Mountain,” and momentarily brought him into the danger Lord Fortescue predicted, that party was not yet in the ascendant. The Girondists were still in power, and though some of their leaders had bent before the storm, that they might not be broken, they had been impressed both by the courage and the tactics of Paine. “The Girondists consulted Paine,” says Lamartine, “and placed him on the Committee of Surveillance.” At this moment many Englishmen were in France, and at a word from Paine some of their heads might have mounted on the pike which Lord Fortescue had imaginatively prepared for the head that wrote “The Rights of Man.” There remained, for instance, Mr. Munro, already mentioned. This gentleman, in a note preserved in the English Archives, had written to Lord Grenville (September 8, 1792) concerning Paine: “What must a nation come to that has so little discernment in the election of their representatives, as to elect such a fellow?” But having lingered in Paris after England’s formal declaration of war (February 11th), Munro was cast into prison. (He owed his release to that “fellow” Paine, and must be duly credited with having acknowledged it, and changed his tone for the rest of his life, – which he probably owed to the English committeeman. Had Paine met with the fate which Lords Gower and Fortescue hoped, it would have gone hard with another eminent countryman of theirs, – Captain Grimstone, R.A. This personage, during a dinner party at the Palais Egalite, got into a controversy with Paine, and, forgetting that the English Jove could not in Paris safely answer argument with thunder, called Paine a traitor to his country and struck him a violent blow. Death was the penalty of striking a deputy, and Paine’s friends were not unwilling to see the penalty inflicted on this stout young Captain who had struck a man of fifty-six. Paine had much trouble in obtaining from Barrere, of the Committee of Public Safety, a passport out of the country for Captain Grimstone, whose travelling expenses were supplied by the man he had struck.
In a later instance, related by Walter Savage Landor, Paine’s generosity amounted to quixotism. The story is finely told by Landor, who says in a note: “This anecdote was communicated to me at Florence by Mr. Evans, a painter of merit, who studied under Lawrence, and who knew personally (Zachariah) Wilkes and Watt. In religion and politics he differed widely from Paine.”
“Sir;” said he, “let me tell you what he did for me. My name is Zachariah Wilkes. I was arrested in Paris and condemned to die. I had no friend here; and it was a time when no friend would have served me: Robespierre ruled. ‘I am innocent!’ I cried in desperation. ‘I am innocent, so help me God! I am condemned for the offence of another.’ I wrote a statement of my case with a pencil; thinking at first of addressing it to my judge, then of directing it to the president of the Convention. The jailer, who had been kind tome, gave me a gazette, and told me not to mind seeing my name, so many were there before it.
“`O!’ said I ‘though you would not lend me your ink, do transmit this paper to the president.’
“`No, my friend!’ answered he gaily. ‘My head is as good as yours, and looks as well between the shoulders, to my liking. - Why not send it (if you send it anywhere) to the deputy Paine here?’ pointing to a column in the paper.
“`O God! he must hate and detest the name of Englishman: pelted, insulted, persecuted, plundered . . . ’
“`I could give it to him,’ said the jailer.
“‘Do then!’ said I wildly. ‘One man more shall know my innocence.’ He came within the half hour. I told him my name, that my employers were Watt and Boulton of Birmingham, that I had papers of the greatest consequence, that if I failed to transmit them, not only my life was in question, but my reputation. He replied: `I know your employers by report only; there are no two men less favourable to the principles I profess, but no two upon earth are honester. You have only one great man among you: it is Watt; for Priestley is gone to America. The church-and-king men would have japanned him. He left to these philosophers of the rival school his house to try experiments on; and you may know, better than I do, how much they found in it of carbon and calx, of silex and argilla.’
“He examined me closer than my judge had done; he required my proofs. After a long time I satisfied him. He then said, ‘The leaders of the Convention would rather have my life than yours. If by any means I can obtain your release on my own security, will you promise me to return within twenty days?’ I answered, ‘Sir, the security I can at present give you, is trifling . . . I should say a mere nothing.’
“‘Then you do not give me your word?’ said he.
“`I give it and will redeem it.’
“He went away, and told me I should see him again when he could inform me whether he had succeeded. He returned in the earlier part of the evening, looked fixedly upon me, and said, ‘Zachariah Wilkes! if you do not return in twenty-four days (four are added) you will be the most unhappy of men; for had you not been an honest one, you could not be the agent of Watt and Boulton. I do not think I have hazarded much in offering to take your place on your failure: such is the condition.’ I was speechless; he was unmoved. Silence was first broken by the jailer. ‘He seems to get fond of the spot now he must leave it.’ I had thrown my arms upon the table towards my liberator, who sat opposite, and I rested my head and breast upon it too, for my temples ached and tears had not yet relieved them. He said, ‘Zachariah! follow me to the carriage.’ The soldiers paid the respect due to his scarf, presenting arms, and drawing up in file as we went along. The jailer called for a glass of wine, gave it me, poured out another, and drank to our next meeting14.”
Another instance may be related in Paine’s own words, written (March 20, 1806) to a gentleman in New York.
“SIR,
“I will inform you of what I know respecting General Miranda, with whom I first became acquainted at New York, about the year 1783. He is a man of talents and enterprise, and the whole of his life has been a life of adventures.
“I went to Europe from New York in April, 1787. Mr. Jefferson was then Minister from America to France, and Mr. Littlepage, a Virginian (whom Mr. Jay knows), was agent for the king of Poland, at Paris. Mr. Littlepage was a young man of extraordinary talents, and I first met with him at Mr. Jefferson’s house at dinner. By his intimacy with the king of Poland, to whom also he was chamberlain, he became well acquainted with the plans and projects of the Northern Powers of Europe. He told me of Miranda’s getting himself introduced to the Empress Catharine of Russia, and obtaining a sum of money from her, four thousand pounds sterling; but it did not appear to me what the object was for which the money was given; it appeared a kind of retaining fee.
“After I had published the first part of the `Rights of Man’ in England, in the year 1791, I met Miranda at the house of Turnbull and Forbes, merchants, Devonshire Square, London. He had been a little before this in the employ of Mr. Pitt, with respect to the affair of Nootka Sound, but I did not at that time know it; and I will, in the course of this letter, inform you how this connection between Pitt and Miranda ended; for I know it of my own knowledge.
‘’I published the second part of the ’Rights of Man’ in London, in February, 1792, and I continued in London till I was elected a member of the French Convention, in September of that year; and went from London to Paris to take my seat in the Convention, which was to meet the 20th of that month. I arrived in Paris on the 19th. After the Convention met, Miranda came to Paris, and was appointed general of the French army, under General Dumouriez. But as the affairs of that army went wrong in the beginning of the year 1793, Miranda was suspected, and was brought under arrest to Paris to take his trial. He summoned me to appear to his character, and also a Mr. Thomas Christie, connected with the house of Turnbull and Forbes. I gave my testimony as I believed, which was, that his leading object was and had been the emancipation of his country, Mexico, from the bondage of Spain; for I did not at that time know of his engagements with Pitt. Mr. Christie’s evidence went to show that Miranda did not come to France as a necessitous adventurer; but believed he came from publicspirited motives, and that he had a large sum of money in the hands of Turnbull and Forbes. The house of Turnbull and Forbes was then in a contract to supply Paris with flour. Miranda was acquitted.
“A few days after his acquittal he came to see me, and in a few days afterwards I returned his visit. He seemed desirous of satisfying me that he was independent, and that he had money in the hands of Turnbull and Forbes. He did not tell me of his affair with old Catharine of Russia, nor did I tell him that I knew of it. But be entered into conversation with respect to Nootka Sound, and put into my hands several letters of Mr. Pitt’s to him on that subject; amongst which was one which I believe he gave me by mistake, for when I had opened it, and was beginning to read it, he put forth his hand and said, ‘O, that is not the letter I intended’; but as the letter was short I soon got through with it, and then returned it to him without making any remarks upon it. The dispute with Spain was then compromised; and Pitt compromised with Miranda for his services by giving him twelve hundred pounds sterling, for this was the contents of the letter.
“Now if it be true that Miranda brought with him a credit upon certain persons in New York for sixty thousand pounds sterling, it is not difficult to suppose from what quarter the money came; for the opening of any proposals between Pitt and Miranda was already made by the affair of Nootka Sound. Miranda was in Paris when Mr. Monroe arrived there as Minister; and as Miranda wanted to get acquainted with him, I cautioned Mr. Monroe against him, and told him of the affair of Nootka Sound, and the twelve hundred pounds.
“You are at liberty to make what use you please of this letter, and with my name to it.”
Here we find a paid agent of Pitt calling on outlawed Paine for aid, by his help liberated from prison; and, when his true character is accidentally discovered, and he is at the outlaw’s mercy, spared, – no doubt because this true English ambassador, who could not enter England, saw that at the moment passionate vengeance had taken the place of justice in Paris. Lord Gower had departed, and Paine must try and shield even his English enemies and their agents, where, as in Miranda’s case, the agency did not appear to affect France. This was while his friends in England were hunted down with ferocity.
In the earlier stages of the French Revolution there was much sympathy with it among literary men and in the universities. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, were leaders in the revolutionary cult at Oxford and Cambridge. By 1792, and especially after the institution of Paine’s prosecution, the repression became determined. The memoir of Thomas Poole, already referred to, gives the experiences of a Somerset gentleman, a friend of Coleridge. After the publication of Paine’s “Rights of Man” (1791) he became a “political Ishmaelite.”
“He made his appearance amongst the wigs and powdered locks of his kinsfolk and acquaintance, male and female, without any of the customary powder in his hair, which innocent novelty was a scandal to all beholders, seeing that it was the outward and visible sign of a love of innovation, a well-known badge of sympathy with democratic ideas.”
Among Poole’s friends, at Stowey, was an attorney named Symes, who lent him Paine’s “Rights of Man.” After Paine’s outlawry Symes met a cabinet-maker with a copy of the book, snatched it out of his hand, tore it up, and, having learned that it was lent him by Poole, propagated about the country that he (Poole) was distributing seditious literature about the country. Being an influential man, Poole prevented the burning of Paine in effigy at Stowey. As time goes on this country-gentleman and scholar finds the government opening his letters, and warning his friends that he is in danger.
“It was,” he writes to a friend, “the boast an Englishman was wont to make that he could think, speak, and write whatever he thought proper, provided he violated no law, nor injured any individual. But now an absolute controul exists, not indeed over, the imperceptible operations of the mind, for those no power of man can controul; but, what is the same thing, over the effects of those operations, and if among these effects, that of speaking is to be checked, the soul is as much enslaved as the body in a cell of the Bastille. The man who once feels, nay fancies, this, is a slave. It shows as if the suspicious secret government of an Italian Republic had replaced the open, candid government of the English laws.”
As Thomas Poole well represents the serious and cultured thought of young England in that time, it is interesting to read his judgment on the king’s execution and the imminent war.
“Many thousands of human beings will be sacrificed in the ensuing contest, and for what? To support three or four individuals, called arbitrary kings, in the situation which they have usurped. I consider every Briton who loses his life in the war us much murdered as the King of France, and every one who approves the war, as signing the deathwarrant of each soldier or sailor that falls . . . . The excesses in France are great; but who are the authors of them? The Emperor of Germany, the King of Prussia, and Mr. Burke. Had it not been for their impertinent interference, I firmly believe the King of France would be at this moment a happy monarch, and that people would be enjoying every advantage of political liberty . . . . The slave-trade, you will see, will not be abolished, because to be, humane and honest now is to be a traitor to the constitution, a lover of sedition and licentiousness? But this universal depression of the human mind cannot last long.”
It was in this spirit that the defence of a free press was undertaken in England. That thirty years’ war was fought and won on the works of Paine. There were some “Lost Leaders”: the king’s execution, the reign of terror, caused reaction in many a fine spirit; but the rank and file followed their Thomas Paine with a faith that crowned heads might envy. The London men knew Paine thoroughly. The treasures of the world would not draw him, nor any terrors drive him, to the side of cruelty and inhumanity. Their eye was upon him. Had Paine, after the king’s execution, despaired of the republic there might have ensued some demoralization among his followers in London. But they saw him by the side of the delivered prisoner of the Bastille, Brissot, an author well known in England, by the side of Condorcet and others of Franklin’s honored circle, engaged in death-struggle with the fire-breathing dragon called “The Mountain.” That was the same unswerving man they had been following, and to all accusations against the revolution their answer was – Paine is still there!
A reign of terror in England followed the outlawry of Paine. Twenty-four men, at one time or another, were imprisoned, fined, or transported for uttering words concerning abuses such as now every Englishman would use concerning the same. Some who sold Paine’s works were imprisoned before Paine’s trial, while the seditious character of the books was not yet legally settled. Many were punished after the trial, by both fine and imprisonment. Newspapers were punished for printing extracts, and for having printed them before the trial15. For this kind of work old statutes passed for other purposes were impressed, new statutes framed, until Fox declared the Bill of Rights repealed, the constitution cut up by the roots, and the obedience of the people to such “despotism” no longer “a question of moral obligation and duty, but of prudence.”16
From his safe retreat in Paris bookseller Rickman wrote his impromptu:
“Hail Briton’s land! Hail freedom’s shore! Far happier than of old; For in thy blessed realms no more The Rights of Man are sold!
The famous town-crier of Bolton, who reported to his masters that he had been round that place “and found in it neither the right of man nor common sense,” made a statement characteristic of the time. The aristocracy and gentry had indeed lost their humanity and their sense under a disgraceful panic. Their serfs, unable to read, were fairly represented by those who, having burned Paine in effigy, asked their employer if there was “any other gemman he would like burnt, for a glass o’ beer.” The White Bear (now replaced by the Criterion Restaurant) no longer knew its little circle of radicals. A symbol of how they were trampled out is discoverable in the “T. P.” shoenails. These nails, with heads so lettered, were in great request among the gentry, who had only to hold up their boot-soles to show how they were trampling on Tom Paine and his principles. This at any rate was accurate. Manufacturers of vases also devised ceramic anathemas.17
In all of this may be read the frantic fears of the King and aristocracy which were driving the Ministry to make good Paine’s aphorism, “There is no English Constitution.” An English Constitution was, however, in process of formation, – in prisons, in secret conclaves, in lands of exile, and chiefly in Paine’s small room in Paris. Even in that time of Parisian turbulence and peril the hunted liberals of England found more security in France than in their native land18. For the eyes of the English reformer of that period, seeing events from prison or exile, there was a perspective such as time has now supplied to the historian. It is still difficult to distribute the burden of shame fairly. Pitt was unquestionably at first anxious to avoid war. That the King was determined on the war is certain; he refused to notice Wilberforce when he appeared at court after his separation from Pitt on that point.
But the three attempts on his life, and his mental infirmity, may be pleaded for George III. Paine, in his Letter To Mr. Secretary Dundas, June 6, 1792, wrote “Madjesty”; when Rickman objected, he said: “Let it stand.” And it stands now as the best apology for the King, while it rolls on Pitt’s memory the guilt of a twenty-two years’ war for the subjugation of thought and freedom. In that last struggle of the barbarism surviving in civilization, it was shown that the madness of a populace was easily distanced by the cruelty of courts. Robespierre and Marat were humanitarian beside George and his Ministers the Reign of error, and all the massacres of the French Revolution put together, were child’s-play compared with the anguish and horrors spread through Europe by a war whose pretext was an execution England might have prevented.
CHAPTER III
REVOLUTION VS. CONSTITUTION
[1793]THE French revolutionists have long borne responsibility for the first declaration of war in 1793. But from December 13, 179219, when the Painophobia Parliament began its debates, to February 1st, when France proclaimed itself at war with England, the British government had done little else than declare war – and prepare war – against France. Pitt, having to be re-elected, managed to keep away from Parliament for several days at its opening, and the onslaught was assumed by Burke. He began by heaping insults on France. On December 15th he boasted that he had not been cajoled by promise of promotion or pension, though he presently, on the same evening, took his seat for the first time on the Treasury bench. In the “Parliamentary History”(vols. xxx. and xxxi.) may be found Burke’s epithets on France, – the “republic of assassins,” “Cannibal Castle,” “nation of murderers,” “gang of plunderers,” “murderous atheists,” “miscreants,” “scum of the earth.” His vocabulary grew in grossness, of course, after the King’s execution and the declaration of war, but from the first it was ribaldry and abuse. And this did not come from a private member, but from the Treasury bench. He was supported by a furious majority which stopped at no injustice. Thus the Convention was burdened with guilt of the September massacres, though it was not then in existence. Paine’s works being denounced, Erskine reminded the House of the illegality of so influencing a trial not yet begun. He was not listened to. Fox and fifty other earnest men had a serious purpose of trying to save the King’s life, and proposed to negotiate with the Convention. Burke fairly foamed at the motions to that end, made by Fox and Lord Lansdowne. What, negotiate with such villains! To whom is our agent to be accredited? Burke draws a comic picture of the English ambassador entering the Convention, and, when he announces himself as from “George Third, by the grace of God,” denounced by Paine. “Are we to humble ourselves before Judge Paine?” At this point Whetstone made a disturbance and was named. There were some who found Burke’s trifling intolerable. Mr. W. Smith reminded the House that Cromwell’s ambassadors had been received by Louis XIV. Fox drew a parallel between the contemptuous terms used toward the French, and others about “Hancock and his crew,” with whom Burke advised treaty, and with whom His Majesty did treat. All this was answered by further insults to France, these corresponding with a series of practical injuries. Lord Gower had been recalled August 17th, after the formation of a republic, and all intercourse with the French Minister in London, Chauvelin, was terminated. In violation of the treaty of 1786, the agents of France were refused permission to purchase grain and arms in England, and their vessels loaded with provisions seized. The circulation of French bonds, issued in 1790, was prohibited in England. A coalition had been formed with the enemies of France, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia. Finally, on the execution of Louis XVI., Chauvelin was ordered (January 24th) to leave England in eight days. Talleyrand remained, but Chauvelin was kicked out of the country, so to say, simply because the Convention had recognized him. This appeared a plain casus belli, and was answered by the declaration of the Convention in that sense (February 1st), which England answered ten days later20.
In all this Paine recognized the hand of Burke. While his adherents in England, as we have seen, were finding in Pitt a successor to Satan, there is a notable absence from Paine’s writings and letters of any such animosity towards that Minister. He regarded Pitt as a victim. “The father of Pitt,” he once wrote, “when a member of the House of Commons, exclaiming one day, during a former war, against the enormous and ruinous expense of German connections, as the offspring of the Hanover succession, and borrowing a metaphor from the story of Prometheus, cried out: `Thus, like Prometheus, is Britain chained to the barren rock of Hanover, whilst the imperial eagle preys upon her vitals.” It is probable that on the intimations from Pitt, at the close of 1792, of his desire for private consultations with friendly Frenchmen, Paine entered into the honorable though unauthorized conspiracy for peace which was terminated by the expulsion of Chauvelin. In the light of later events, and the desertion of Dumouriez, these overtures of Pitt made through Talleyrand (then in London) were regarded by the French leaders, and are still regarded by French writers, as treacherous. But no sufficient reason is given for doubting Pitt’s good faith in that matter. Writing to the President (Washington), December 28, 1792, the American Minister, Gouverneur Morris, states the British proposal to be:
“France shall deliver the royal family to such branch of the Bourbons as the King may choose, and shall recall her troops from the countries they now occupy. In this event Britain will send hither a Minister and acknowledge the Republic, and mediate a peace with the Emperor and King of Prussia. I have several reasons to believe that this information is not far from the truth.”
It is true that Pitt had no agent in France whom he might not have disavowed, and that after the fury with which the Painophobia Parliament, under lead of Burke, inspired by the King, had opened, could hardly have maintained any peaceful terms. Nevertheless, the friends of peace in France secretly acted on this information, which Gouverneur Morris no doubt received from Paine. A grand dinner was given by Paine, at the Hotel de Ville, to Dumouriez, where this brilliant General met Brissot, Condorcet, Santerre, and several eminent English radicals, among them Sampson Perry. At this time it was proposed to send Dumouriez secretly to London, to negotiate with Pitt, but this was abandoned. Maret went, and be found Pitt gracious and pacific. Chauvelin, however, advised the French government of this illicit negotiation, and Maret was ordered to return. Such was the situation when Louis was executed. That execution, as we have seen, might have been prevented had Pitt provided the money; but it need not be supposed that, with Burke now on the Treasury bench, the refusal is to be ascribed to anything more than his inability to cope with his own majority, whom the King was patronizing. So completely convinced of Pitt’s pacific disposition were Maret and his allies in France that the clandestine ambassador again departed for London: But on arriving at Dover, he learned that Chauvelin had been expelled, and at once returned to France21.
Paine now held more firmly than ever the first article of his faith as to practical politics: the chief task of republicanism is to break the Anglo-German sceptre. France is now committed to war; it must be elevated to that European aim. Lord North and America reappear in Burke and France.
Meanwhile what is said of Britain in his “Rights of Man” was now more terribly true of France – it had no Constitution. The Committee on the Constitution had declared themselves ready to report early in the winter, but the Mountaineers managed that the matter should be postponed until after the King’s trial. As an American who prized his citizenship, Paine felt chagrined and compromised at being compelled to act as a legislator and a judge because of his connection with a Convention elected for the purpose of framing a legislative and judicial machinery. He and Condorcet continued to add touches to this Constitution, the Committee approving, and on the first opportunity it was reported again. This was February 15, 1793. But, says the Moniteur, “the struggles between the Girondins and the Mountain caused the examination and discussion to be postponed.” It was, however, distributed.
Gouverneur Morris, in a letter to Jefferson (March 7th), says this Constitution “was read to the Convention, but I learnt the next morning that a Council had been held on it overnight, by which it was condemned.” Here is evidence in our American archives of a meeting or “Council” condemning the Constitution on the night of its submission. It must have been secret, for it does not appear in French histories, so far as I can discover. Durand de Maillane says that “the exclusion of Robespierre and Couthon from this eminent task framing a Constitution was a new matter for discontent and jealousy against the party of Petion” – a leading Girondin, – and that Robespierre and his men desired “to render their work useless.”22 No indication of this secret condemnation of the Paine-Condorcet Constitution, by a conclave appeared on March 1st, when the document was again submitted. The Convention now set April 15th for its discussion, and the Mountaineers fixed that day for the opening of their attack on the Girondins. The Mayor of Paris appeared with a petition, adopted by the Communal Council of the thirty-five sections of Paris, for the arrest of twenty-two members of the Convention, as slanderers of Paris, – “presenting the Parisians to Europe as men of blood,” – friends of Roland, accomplices of the traitor Dumouriez, enemies of the clubs. The deputies named were: Brissot, Guadet, Vergniaud, Gensonne, Grangeneuve, Buzot, Barbaroux, Salles, Biroteau, Pontecoulant, Petion, Lanjuinais, Valaze, Hardy, Louvet, Lehardy, Gorsas, Abbe Fauchet, Lanthenas, Lasource, Valady, Chambon. Of this list five were members of the Committee on the Constitution, and two supplementary members. Besides this, two of the arraigned – Louvet and Lasource – had been especially active in pressing forward the Constitution. The Mountaineers turned the discord they thus caused into a reason for deferring discussion of the Constitution. They declared also that important members were absent, levying troops, and especially that Marat’s trial had been ordered. The discussion on the petition against the Girondins, and whether the Constitution should be considered, proceeded together for two days, when the Mountaineers were routed on both issues. The Convention returned the petition to the Mayor, pronouncing it “calumnious,” and it made the Constitution the order of the day. Robespierre, according to Durand-Maillane, showed much spite at this defeat. He adroitly secured a decision that the preliminary “Declaration of Rights” should be discussed first, as there could be endless talk on those generalities23.
It now appears plain that Robespierre, Marat, and the Mountaineers generally were resolved that there should be no new government. The difference between them and their opponents was fundamental: to them the Revolution was an end, to the others a means. The Convention was a purely revolutionary body. It had arbitrarily absorbed all legislative and judicial functions, exercising them without responsibility to any code or constitution. For instance, in State Trials French law required three fourths of the voices for condemnation; had the rule been followed Louis XVI. would not have perished. Lanjuinais had pressed the point, and it was answered that the sentence on Louis was political, for the interest of the State; salus pobuli supremo lex. This implied that the Convention, turning aside from its appointed functions, had, in anticipation of the judicial forms it meant to establish, constituted itself into a Vigilance Committee to save the State in an emergency. But it never turned back again to its proper work. Now when the Constitution was framed, every possible obstruction was placed in the way of its adoption, which would have relegated most of the Mountaineers to private life.
Robespierre and Marat were in luck. The Paine-Condorcet Constitution omitted all mention of a Deity. Here was the immemorial and infallible recipe for discord, of which Robespierre made the most. He took the “Supreme Being” under his protection; he also took morality under his protection, insisting that the PaineCondorcet Constitution gave liberty even to illicit traffic. While these discussions were going on Marat gained his triumphant acquittal from the charges made against him by the Girondins. This damaging blow further demoralized the majority which was eager for the Constitution. By violence, by appeals against atheism, by all crafty tactics, the Mountaineers secured recommitment of the Constitution. To the Committee were added Herault de Sechelles, Ramel, Mathieu, Couthon, Saint-Just, – all from the Committee of Public Safety. The Constitution as committed was the most republican document of the kind ever drafted, as remade it was a revolutionary instrument; but its preamble read: “In the presence and under the guidance (auspices) of the Supreme Being, the French People declare,” etc.
God was in the Constitution; but when it was reported (June Loth) the Mountaineers had their opponents en route for the scaffold. The arraignment of the twenty-two, declared by the Convention “calumnious” six weeks before, was approved on June 2d. It was therefore easy to pass such a constitution as the victors desired. Some had suggested, during the theological debate, that “many crimes had been sanctioned by this King of kings,” – no doubt with emphasis on the discredited royal name. Robespierre identified his “Supreme Being” with NATURE, of whose ferocities the poor Girondins soon had tragical evidence24.
The Constitution was adopted by the Convention on June 25th; it was ratified by the Communes August 10th. When it was proposed to organize a government under it, and dissolve the Convention, Robespierre remarked: That sounds like a suggestion of Pitt! Thereupon the Constitution was suspended until universal peace, and the Revolution superseded the Republic as end and aim of France25.
Some have ascribed to Robespierre a phrase he borrowed, on one occasion, from Voltaire, Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer [If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. – Digital Editor’s Translation.] Robespierre’s originality was that he did invent a god, made in his own image, and to that idol offered human sacrifices, – beginning with his own humanity. That he was genuinely superstitious is suggested by the plausibility with which his enemies connected him
with the “prophetess,” Catharine Theot, who pronounced him the reincarnate “Word of God.” Certain it is that he revived the old forces of fanaticism, and largely by their aid crushed the Girondins, who were rationalists. Condorcet had said that in preparing a Constitution for France they had not consulted Numa’s nymph or the pigeon of Mahomet; they had found human reason sufficient.
Corruption of best is worst. In the proportion that a humane deity would be a potent sanction for righteous laws, an inhuman deity is the sanction of inhuman laws. He who summoned a nature-god to the French Convention let loose the scourge on France. Nature inflicts on mankind, every day, a hundred-fold the agonies of the Reign of Terror. Robespierre had projected into nature a sentimental conception of his own, but he had no power to master the force he had evoked. That had to take the shape of the nature-gods of all time, and straightway dragged the Convention down to the savage plane where discussion becomes an exchange of thunder-stones. Such relapses are not very difficult to effect in revolutionary times. By killing off sceptical variations, and cultivating conformity, a cerebral evolution proceeded for ages by which kind-hearted people were led to worship jealous and cruel gods, who, should they appear in human form, would be dealt with as criminals. Unfortunately, however, the nature-god does not so appear; it is represented in euphemisms, while at the same time it coerces the social and human standard. Since the nature-god punishes hereditarily, kills every man at last, and so tortures millions that the suggestion of hell seems only too probable to those sufferers, a political system formed under the legitimacy of such a superstition must subordinate crimes to sins, regard atheism as worse than theft, acknowledge the arbitrary principle, and confuse retaliation with justice. From the time that the shekinah of the nature-god settled on the Mountain, offences were measured, not by their injury to man, but as insults to the Mountain-god, or to his anointed. In the mysterious counsels of the Committee of Public Safety the rewards are as little harmonious with the human standard as in the ages when sabbath-breaking and murder met the same doom. Under the paralyzing splendor of a divine authority, any such considerations as the suffering or death of men become petty. The average Mountaineer was unable to imagine that those who tried to save Louis had other than royalist motives. In this Armageddon the Girondins were far above their opponents in humanity and intelligence, but the conditions did not admit of an entire adherence to their honorable weapons of argument and eloquence. They too often used deadly threats, without meaning them; the Mountaineers, who did mean them, took such phrases seriously, and believed the struggle to be one of life and death. Such phenomena of bloodshed, connected with absurdly inadequate causes, are known in history only where gods mingle in the fray. Reign of Terror? What is the ancient reign of the god of battles, jealous, angry every day, with everlasting tortures of fire prepared for the unorthodox, however upright, even more than for the immoral? In France too it was a suspicion of unorthodoxy in the revolutionary creed that plunged most of the sufferers into the lake of fire and brimstone.
From the time of Paine’s speeches on the King’s fate he was conscious that Marat’s evil eye was on him. The American’s inflexible republicanism had inspired the vigilance of the powerful journals of Brissot and Bonneville, which barred the way to any dictatorship. Paine was even propagating a doctrine against presidency, thus marring the example of the United States, on which ambitious Frenchmen, from Marat to the Napoleons, have depended for their stepping-stone to despotism. Marat could not have any doubt of Paine’s devotion to the Republic, but knew well his weariness of the Revolution. In the simplicity of his republican faith Paine had made a great point of the near adoption of the Constitution, and dissolution of the Convention in five or six months, little dreaming that the Mountaineers were concentrating themselves on the aim of becoming masters of the existing Convention and then rendering it permanent. Marat regarded Paine’s influence as dangerous to revolutionary government, and, as he afterwards admitted, desired to crush him. The proposed victim had several vulnerable points: he had been ultimate with Gouverneur Morris, whose hostility to France was known; he had been intimate with Dumouriez, declared a traitor; and he had no connection with any of the Clubs, in which so many found asylum. He might have joined one of them had he known the French language, and perhaps it would have been prudent to unite himself with the “Cordeliers,” in whose esprit de corps some of his friends found refuge.
However, the time of intimidation did not come for two months after the King’s death, and Paine was busy with Condorcet on the task assigned them, of preparing an Address to the People of England concerning the war of their government against France. This work, if ever completed, does not appear to have been published. It was entrusted (February 1st) to Barrere, Paine, Condorcet, and M. Faber. As Frederic Masson, the learned librarian and historian of the Office of Foreign Affairs, has found some trace of its being assigned to Paine and Condorcet, it may be that further research will bring to light the Address. It could hardly have been completed before the warfare broke out between the Mountain and the Girondins, when anything emanating from Condorcet and Paine would have been delayed, if not suppressed. There are one or two brief essays in Condorcet’s works notably “The French Republic to Free Men” – which suggest collaboration with Paine, and may be fragments of their Address26.
At this time the long friendship between Paine and Condorcet, and the Marchioness too, had become very intimate. The two men had acted together on the King’s trial at every step, and their speeches on bringing Louis to trial suggest previous consultations between them.
Early in April Paine was made aware of Marat’s hostility to him. General Thomas Ward reported to him a conversation in which Marat had said: “Frenchmen are mad to allow foreigners to live among them. They should cut off their ears, let them bleed a few days, and then cut off their heads.” “But you yourself are a foreigner,” Ward had replied, in allusion to Marat’s Swiss birth27. The answer is not reported. At length a tragical incident occurred, just before the trial of Marat (April 13th), – which brought Paine face to face with this enemy. A wealthy young Englishman, named Johnson, with whom Paine had been intimate in London, had followed him to Paris, where he lived in the same house with his friend. His love of Paine amounted to worship. Having heard of Marat’s intention to have Paine’s life taken, such was the young enthusiast’s despair, and so terrible the wreck of his republican dreams, that he resolved on suicide. He made a will bequeathing his property to Paine, and stabbed himself. Fortunately he was saved by some one who entered just as he was about to give himself the third blow. It may have been Paine himself who then saved his friend’s life; at any rate, he did so eventually.
The decree for Marat’s trial was made amid galleries crowded with his adherents, male and female (“Dames de la Fraternite”), who hurled cries of wrath on every one who said a word against him. All were armed, the women ostentatious of their poignards. The trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal was already going in Marat’s favor, when it was determined by the Girondins to bring forward this affair of Johnson. Paine was not, apparently, a party to this move, though he had enjoined no secrecy in telling his friend Brissot of the incident, which occurred before Marat was accused. On April 16th there appeared in Brissot’s journal Le Patriote Franc,ais, the following paragraph:
“A sad incident has occurred to apprise the anarchists of the mournful fruits of their frightful teaching. An Englishman, whose name I reserve, had abjured his country because of his detestation of kings; he came to France hoping to find there liberty; he saw only its mask on the hideous visage of anarchy. Heart-broken by this spectacle, he determined on self-destruction. Before dying, he wrote the following words, which we have read, as written by his own trembling hand, on a paper which is in the possession of a distinguished foreigner: – ‘I had come to France to enjoy Liberty, but Marat has assassinated it. Anarchy is even more cruel than despotism. I am unable to endure this grievous sight, of the triumph of imbecility and inhumanity over talent and virtue.’”
The acting editor of Le Patriote Franc,is, Girey-Dupre, was summoned before the Tribunal, where Marat was on trial, and estified that the note published had been handed to him by Brissot, who assured him that it was from the original, in the hands of Thomas Paine. Paine deposed that he had been unacquainted with Marat before the Convention assembled; that he had not supposed Johnson’s note to have any connection with the accusations against Marat.
President. – Did you give a copy of the note to Brissot?
Paine. – I showed him the original.
President. – Did you send it to him as it is printed?
Paine. – Brissot could only have written this note after what I read to him, and told him. I would observe to the tribunal that Johnson gave himself two blows with the knife after he had understood that Marat would denounce him.
Marat. – Not because I would denounce the youth who stabbed himself, but because I wish to denounce Thomas Paine28.
Paine (continuing). – Johnson had for some time suffered mental anguish. As for Marat, I never spoke to him but once. In the lobby of the Convention he said to me that the English people are free and happy; I replied, they groan under a double despotism29.
No doubt it had been resolved to keep secret the fact that young Johnson was still alive. The moment was critical; a discovery that Brissot had written or printed “avant de mourir” of one still alive might have precipitated matters.
It came out in the trial that Marat, addressing a club (“Friends of Liberty and Equality”), had asked them to register a vow to recall from the Convention “all of those faithless members who had betrayed their duties in trying to save a tyrant’s life,” such deputies being “traitors, royalists, or fools.”
Meanwhile the Constitution was undergoing discussion in the Convention, and to that Paine now gave his entire attention. On April 20th the Convention, about midnight, when the Moderates had retired and the Mountaineers found themselves masters of the field, voted to entertain the petition of the Parisian sections against the Girondins. Paine saw the star of the Republic sinking. On “April 20th, 2d year of the Republic,” he wrote as follows to Jefferson:
“My dear Friend,
“The gentleman (Dr. Romer) to whom I entrust this letter is an intimate acquaintance of Lavater; but I have not had the opportunity of seeing him, as he had set off for Havre prior to my writing this letter, which I forward to him under cover from one of his friends, who is also an acquaintance of mine.
“We are now in an extraordinary crisis, and it is not altogether without some considerable faults here. Dumouriez, partly from having no fixed principles of his own, and partly from the continual persecution of the Jacobins, who act without either prudence or morality, has gone off to the Enemy, and taken a considerable part of the Army with him. The expedition to Holland has totally failed and all Brabant is again in the hands of the Austrians.
“You may suppose the consternation which such a sudden reverse of fortune has occasioned, but it has been without commotion. Dumouriez threatened to be in Paris in three weeks. It is now three weeks ago; he is still on the frontier near to Mons with the Enemy, who do not make any progress. Dumouriez has proposed to re-establish the former Constitution, in which plan the Austrians act with him. But if France and the National Convention act prudently this project will not succeed. In the first place there is a popular disposition against it, and there is force sufficient to prevent it. In the next place, a great deal is to be taken into the calculation with respect to the Enemy. There are now so many powers accidentally jumbled together as to render it exceedingly difficult to them to agree upon any common object.
“The first object, that of restoring the old Monarchy, is evidently given up by the proposal to re-establish the late Constitution. The object of England and Prussia was to preserve Holland, and the object of Austria was to recover Brabant; while those separate objects lasted, each party having one, the Confederation could hold together, each helping the other; but after this I see not how a common object is to be formed. To all this is to be added the probable disputes about opportunity, the expense, and the projects of reimbursements. The Enemy has once adventured into France, and they had the permission or the good fortune to get back again. On every military calculation it is a hazardous adventure, and armies are not much disposed to try a second time the ground upon which they have been defeated.
“Had this revolution been conducted consistently with its principles, there was once a good prospect of extending liberty through the greatest part of Europe; but I now relinquish that hope. Should the Enemy by venturing into France put themselves again in a condition of being captured, the hope will revive; but this is a risk that I do not wish to see tried, lest it should fail.
“As the prospect of a general freedom is now much shortened, I begin to contemplate returning home. I shall await the event of the proposed Constitution, and then take my final leave of Europe. I have not written to the President, as I have nothing to communicate more than in this letter. Please to present to him my affection and compliments, and remember me among the circle of my friends.
Your sincere and affectionate friend,
"THOMAS PAINE.“P. S. I just now received a letter from General Lewis Morris, who tells me that the house and barn on my farm at N. Rochelle are burnt down. I assure you I shall not bring money enough to build another.”
Four days after this letter was written Marat, triumphant, was crowned with oak leaves. Foufrede in his speech (April 16th) had said: “Marat has formally demanded dictatorship.” This was the mob’s reply: Bos locutus est.
With Danton, Paine had been on friendly terms, though he described as “rose water” the author’s pleadings against the guillotine. On May 6th, Paine wrote to Danton a letter brought to light by Taine, who says: “Compared with the speeches and writings of the time, it produces the strangest effect by its practical good sense30.” Dr. Robinet also finds here evidence of “a lucid and wise intellect.”31
“PARIS, May 6th, 2nd year of the Republic (1793).
“CITOYEN DANTON:
“As you read English, I write this letter to you without passing it through the hands of a translator. I am exceedingly disturbed at the distractions, jealousies, discontents and uneasiness that reign among us, and which, if they continue, will bring ruin and disgrace on the Republic. When I left America in the year 1787, it was my intention to return the year following, but the French Revolution, and the prospect it afforded of extending the principles of liberty and fraternity through the greater part of Europe, have induced me to prolong my stay upwards of six years. I now despair of seeing the great object of European liberty accomplished, and my despair arises not from the combined foreign powers, not from the intrigues of aristocracy and priestcraft, but from the tumultuous misconduct with which the internal affairs of the present revolution is conducted.
“All that now can be hoped for is limited to France only, and I agree with your motion of not interfering in the government of any foreign country, nor permitting any foreign country to interfere in the government of France. This decree was necessary as a preliminary toward terminating the war. But while these internal contentions continue, while the hope remains to the enemy of seeing the Republic fall to pieces, while not only the representatives of the departments but representation itself is publicly insulted, as it has lately been and now is by the people of Paris, or at least by the tribunes, the enemy will be encouraged to hang about the frontiers and await the issue of circumstances.
“I observe that the confederated powers have not yet recognised Monsieur, or D’Artois, as regent, nor made any proclamation in favour of any of the Bourbons; but this negative conduct admits of two different conclusions. The one is that of abandoning the Bourbons and the war together; the other is that of changing the object of the war and substituting a partition scheme in the place of their first object, as they have done by Poland. If this should be their object, the internal contentions that now rage will favour that object far more than it favoured their former object. The danger every day increases of a rupture between Paris and the departments. The departments did not send their deputies to Paris to be insulted, and every insult shown to them is an insult to the departments that elected and sent them. I see but one effectual plan to prevent this rupture taking place, and that is to fix the residence of the Convention, and of the future assemblies, at a distance from Paris.
“I saw, during the American Revolution, the exceeding inconvenience that arose by having the government of Congress within the limits of any Municipal Jurisdiction. Congress first resided in Philadelphia, and after a residence of four years it found it necessary to leave it. It then adjourned to the State of Jersey. It afterwards removed to New York; it again removed from New York to Philadelphia, and after experiencing in every one of these places the great inconvenience of a government, it formed the project of building a Town, not within the limits of any municipal jurisdiction, for the future residence of Congress. In any one of the places where Congress resided, the municipal authority privately or openly opposed itself to the authority of Congress, and the people of each of those places expected more attention from Congress than their equal share with the other States amounted to. The same thing now takes place in France, but in a far greater excess.
“I see also another embarrassing circumstance arising in Paris of which we have had full experience in America. I mean that of fixing the price of provisions. But if this measure is to be attempted it ought to be done by the Municipality. The Convention has nothing to do with regulations of this kind; neither can they be carried into practice. The people of Paris may say they will not give more than a certain price for provisions, but as they cannot compel the country people to bring provisions to market the consequence will be directly contrary to their expectations, and they will find dearness and famine instead of plenty and cheapness. They may force the price down upon the stock in hand, but after that the market will be empty.
“I will give you an example. In Philadelphia we undertook, among other regulations of this kind, to regulate the price of Salt; the consequence was that no Salt was brought to market, and the price rose to thirty-six shillings sterling per Bushel. The price before the war was only one shilling and sixpence per Bushel; and we regulated the price of flour (farine) till there was none in the market, and the people were glad to procure it at any price.
“There is also a circumstance to be taken into the account which is not much attended to. The assignats are not of the same value they were a year ago, and as the quantity increases the value of them will diminish. This gives the appearance of things being dear when they are not so in fact, for in the same proportion that any kind of money falls in value articles rise in price. If it were not for this the quantity of assignats would be too great to be circulated. Paper money in America fell so much in value from this excessive quantity of it, that in the year 1781, I gave three hundred paper dollars for one pair of worsted stockings. What I write you upon this subject is experience, and not merely opinion.
“I have no personal interest in any of these matters, nor in any party disputes. I attend only to general principles.
“As soon as a constitution shall be established I shall return to America; and be the future prosperity of France ever so great, I shall enjoy no other part of it than the happiness of knowing it. In the mean time I am distressed to see matters so badly conducted, and so little attention paid to moral principles. It is these things that injure the character of the Revolution and discourage the progress of liberty all over the world.
“When I began this letter I did not intend making it so lengthy, but since I have gone thus far I will fill up the remainder of the sheet with such matters as occur to me.
“There ought to be some regulation with respect to the spirit of denunciation that now prevails. If every individual is to indulge his private malignacy or his private ambition, to denounce at random and without any kind of proof, all confidence will be undermined and all authority be destroyed Calumny is a species of Treachery that ought to be punished as well as any other kind of Treachery. It is a private vice productive of public evils; because it is possible to irritate men into disaffection by continual calumny who never intended to be disaffected. It is therefore, equally as necessary to guard against the evils of unfounded or malignant suspicion as against the evils of blind confidence. It is equally as necessary to protect the characters of public officers from calumny as it is to punish them for treachery or misconduct. For my own part I shall hold it a matter of doubt, until better evidence arises than is known at present, whether Dumouriez has been a traitor from policy or from resentment. There was certainly a time when he acted well, but it is not every man whose mind is strong enough to bear up against ingratitude, and I think he experienced a great deal of this before he revolted. Calumny becomes harmless and defeats itself when it attempts to act upon too large a scale. Thus the denunciation of the Sections [of Paris] against the twenty-two deputies falls to the ground. The departments that elected them are better judges of their moral and political characters than those who have denounced them. This denunciation will injure Paris in the opinion of the departments because it has the appearance of dictating to them what sort of deputies they shall elect. Most of the acquaintances that I have in the convention are among those who are in that list, and I know there are not better men nor better patriots than what they are.
“I have written a letter to Marat of the same date as this but not on the same subject. He may show it to you if he chuse.
“Votre Ami,
"THOMAS PAINS.“Citoyen Danton.”
It is to be hoped that Paine’s letter to Marat may be discovered in France; it is shown by the Cobbett papers, printed in the Appendix, that he kept a copy, which there is reason to fear perished with General Bonneville’s library in St. Louis. Whatever may be the letter’s contents, there is no indication that thereafter Marat troubled Paine. Possibly Danton and Marat compared their letters, and the latter got it into his head that hostility to this American, anxious only to cross the ocean, could be of no advantage to him. Or perhaps he remembered that if a hue and cry were raised against “foreigners” it could not stop short of his own leaf-crowned Neufchatel head. He had shown some sensitiveness about that at his trial. Samson Pegnet had testified that, at conversations in Paine’s house, Marat had been reported as saying that it was necessary to massacre all the foreigners, especially the English. This Marat pronounced an “atrocious calumny, a device of the statesmen his epithet for Girondins] to render me odious.” Whatever his motives, there is reason to believe that Marat no longer included Paine in his proscribed list. Had it been otherwise a fair opportunity of striking down Paine presented itself on the occasion, already alluded to, when Paine gave his testimony in favor of General Miranda. Miranda was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on May 12th, and three days following. He had served under Dumouriez, was defeated, and was suspected of connivance with his treacherous commander. Paine was known to have been friendly with Dumouriez, and his testimony in favor of Miranda might naturally have been used against both men. Miranda was, however, acquitted, and that did not make Marat better disposed towards that adventurer’s friends, all Girondins, or, like Paine, who belonged to no party, hostile to Jacobinism. Yet when, on June 2d, the doomed Girondins were arrested, there were surprising exceptions: Paine and his literary collaborateur, Condorcet. Moreover, though the translator of Paine’s works, Lanthenas, was among the proscribed, his name was erased on Marat’s motion.
On June 7th Robespierre demanded a more stringent law against foreigners, and one was soon after passed ordering their imprisonment. It was understood that this could not apply to the two foreigners in the Convention – Paine and Anacharsis Clootz, though it was regarded as a kind of warning to them. I have seen it stated, but without authority, that Paine had been admonished by Danton to stay away from the Convention on June 2d, and from that day there could not be the slightest utility in his attendance. The Mountaineers had it all their own way. For simply criticising the Constitution they brought forward in place of that of the first committee, Condorcet had to fly from prosecution. Others also fled, among them Brissot and Duchatel. What with the arrestations and flights Paine found himself, in June, almost alone. In the Convention he was sometimes the solitary figure left on the Plain, where but now sat the brilliant statesmen of France. They, his beloved friends, have started in procession towards the guillotine, for even flight must end there; daily others are pressed into their ranks; his own summons, he feels, is only a question of a few weeks or days. How Paine loved those men – Brissot, Condorcet, Lasource, Duchatel, Vergniaud, Gensonne! Never was man more devoted to his intellectual comrades. Even across a century one may realize what it meant to him, that march of some of his best friends to the scaffold, while others were hunted through France, and the agony of their families, most of whom he well knew.
Alas, even this is not the worst! For what were the personal fate of himself or any compared with the fearful fact that the harvest is past and the republic not saved! Thus had ended all his labors, and his visions of the Commonwealth of Man. The time had come when many besides poor Johnson sought peace in annihilation. Paine, heartbroken, sought oblivion in brandy. Recourse to such anaesthetic, of which any affectionate man might fairly avail himself under such incredible agony as the ruin of his hopes and the approaching murder of his dearest friends, was hitherto unknown in Paine’s life. He drank freely, as was the custom of his time; but with the exception of the evidence of an enemy at his trial in England, that he once saw him under the influence of wine after a dinner party (1792), which he admitted was “unusual,” no intimation of excess is discoverable in any contemporary record of Paine until this his fifty-seventh year. He afterwards told his friend Rickman that, “borne down by public and private affliction, he had been driven to excesses in Paris”; and, as it was about this time that Gouverneur Morris and Colonel Bosville, who had reasons for disparaging Paine, reported stories of his drunkenness (growing ever since), we may assign the excesses mainly to June. It will be seen by comparison of the dates of events and documents presently mentioned that Paine could not have remained long in this pardonable refuge of mental misery. Charlotte Corday’s poignard cut a rift in the black cloud. After that tremendous July 13th there is positive evidence not only of sobriety, but of life and work on Paine’s part that make the year memorable.
Marat dead, hope springs up for the arrested Girondins. They are not yet in prison, but under “arrestation in their homes”; death seemed inevitable while Marat lived, but Charlotte Corday has summoned a new leader. Why may Paine’s imperilled comrades not come forth again? Certainly they will if the new chieftain is Danton, who under his radical rage hides a heart. Or if Marat’s mantle falls on Robespierre, would not that scholarly lawyer, who would have abolished capital punishment, reverse Marat’s cruel decrees? Robespierre had agreed to the new Constitution (reported by Paine’s friend, Herault de Sechelles) and when even that dubious instrument returns with the popular sanction, all may be well. The Convention, which is doing everything except what it was elected to do, will then dissolve, and the happy Republic remember it only as a nightmare. So Paine takes heart again, abandons the bowl of forgetfulness, and becomes a republican Socrates instructing disciples in an old French garden.
CHAPTER IV
A GARDEN IN THE FAUBOURG ST. DENIS
[1793]SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN has written a pregnant passage, reminding the world of the moral burden which radicals in England had to bear a hundred years ago.
“When to speak or write one’s mind on politics is to obtain the reputation, and render one’s self liable to the punishment of a criminal, social discredit, with all its attendant moral dangers, soon attaches itself to the more humble opponents of a ministry. To be outside the law as a publisher or a pamphleteer is only less trying to conscience and conduct than to be outside the law as a smuggler or a poacher; and those who, ninety years ago, placed themselves within the grasp of the penal statutes as they were administered in England and barbarously perverted in Scotland were certain to be very bold men, and pretty sure to be unconventional up to the uttermost verge of respectability. As an Italian Liberal was sometimes half a bravo, and a Spanish patriot often more than half a brigand, so a British Radical under George the Third had generally, it must be confessed, a dash of the Bohemian. Such, in a more or less mitigated form, were Paine and Cobbett, Hunt, Hone, and Holcroft; while the same causes in part account for the elfish vagaries of Shelley and the grim improprieties of Godwin. But when we recollect how these, and the like of these, gave up every hope of worldly prosperity, and set their life and liberty in continual hazard for the sake of that personal and political freedom which we now exercise as unconsciously as we breathe the air, it would be too exacting to require that each and all of them should have lived as decorously as Perceval, and died as solvent as Bishop mainline.’’32
To this right verdict it may be added that, even at the earlier period when it was most applicable, the radicals could only produce one rival in profligacy (John Wilkes) to their aristocratic oppressors. It may also be noted as a species of homage that the slightest failings of eminent reformers become historic. The vices of Burke and Fox are forgotten. Who remembers that the younger Pitt was brought to an early grave by the bottle? But every fault of those who resisted his oppression is placed under a solar microscope. Although, as Sir George affirms, the oppressors largely caused the faults, this homage to the higher moral standard of the reformers may be accepted33.
It was, indeed, a hard time for reformers in England. Among them were many refined gentlemen who felt that it was no country for a thinker and scholar to live in. Among the pathetic pictures of the time was that of the twelve scholars, headed by Coleridge and Southey, and twelve ladies, who found the atmosphere of England too impure for any but slaves to breathe, and proposed to seek in America some retreat where their pastoral “pantisocrasy” might be realized. Lack of funds prevented the fulfilment of this dream, but that it should have been an object of concert and endeavor, in that refined circle at Bristol, is a memorable sign of that dreadful time. In the absence of means to form such communities, preserving the culture and charm of a society evolved out of barbarism, apart from the walls of a remaining political barbarism threatening it with their ruins, some scholars were compelled, like Coleridge, to rejoin the feudalists, and help them to buttress the crumbling castle. They secured themselves from the social deterioration of living on wild “honey-dew” in a wilderness, at cost of wearing intellectual masks. Some fled to America, like Cobbett. But others fixed their abode in Paris, where radicalism was fashionable and invested with the charm of the salon and the theatre.
Before the declaration of war Paine had been on friendly terms with some eminent Englishmen in Paris: he dined every week with Lord Lauderdale, Dr. John Moore, an author, and others in some restaurant. After most of these had followed Lord Gower to England he had to be more guarded. A British agent, Major Semple, approached him under the name of Major Lisle. He professed to be an Irish patriot, wore the green cockade, and desired introduction to the Minister of War. Paine fortunately knew too many Irishmen to fall into this snare34. But General Miranda, as we have seen, fared better. Paine was, indeed, so overrun with visitors and adventurers that he appropriated two mornings of each week at the Philadelphia House for levees. These, however, became insufficient to stem the constant stream of visitors, including spies and lion-hunters, so that he had little time for consultation with the men and women whose co-operation he needed in public affairs. He therefore leased an out-of-the-way house, reserving knowledge of it for particular friends, while still retaining his address at the Philadelphia Hotel, where the levees were continued.
The irony of fate had brought an old mansion of Madame de Pompadour to become the residence of Thomas Paine and his half dozen English disciples. It was then, – and still is, No.63 Faubourg St. Denis. Here, where a King’s mistress held her merry fetes, and issued the decrees of her reign sometimes of terror, the little band of English humanitarians read and conversed, and sported in the garden. In a little essay on “Forgetfulness,” addressed to his friend, Lady Smith, Paine described these lodgings.
“They were the most agreeable, for situation, of any I ever had in Paris, except that they were too remote from the Convention, of which I was then a member. But this was recompensed by their being also remote from the alarms and confusion into which the interior of Paris was then often thrown. The news of those things used to arrive to us, as if we were in a state of tranquillity in the country. The house, which was enclosed by a wall and gateway from the street, was a good deal like an old mansion farm-house, and the court-yard was like a farm yard, stocked with fowls, – ducks, turkies, and geese; which, for amusement, we used to feed out of the parlor window on the ground floor. There were some hutches for rabbits, and a sty with two pigs. Beyond was a garden of more than an acre of ground, well laid out, and stocked with excellent fruit trees. The orange, apricot, and greengage plum were the best I ever tasted; and it is the only place where I saw the wild cucumber. The place had formerly been occupied by some curious person.
“My apartments consisted of three rooms; the first for wood, water, etc.; the next was the bedroom; and beyond it the sitting room, which looked into the garden through a glass door; and on the outside there was a small landing place railed in, and a flight of narrow stairs almost hidden by the vines that grew over it, by which I could descend into the garden without going down stairs through the house . . . . I used to find some relief by walking alone in the garden, after dark, and cursing with hearty good-will the authors of that terrible system that had turned the character of the Revolution I had been proud to defend. I went but little to the Convention, and then only to make my appearance; because I found it impossible to join in their tremendous decrees, and useless and dangerous to oppose them. My having voted and spoken extensively, more so than any other member, against the execution of the king, had already fixed a mark upon me; neither dared any of my associates in the Convention to translate and speak in French for me anything I might have dared to have written . . . . Pen and ink were then of no use to me; no good could be done by writing, and no printer dared to print; and whatever I might have written, for my private amusement, as anecdotes of the times, would have been continually exposed to be examined, and tortured into any meaning that the rage of party might fix upon it. And as to softer subjects, my heart was in distress at the fate of my friends, and my harp hung upon the weeping willows.
“As it was summer, we spent most of our time in the garden, and passed it away in those childish amusements that serve to keep reflection from the mind, – such as marbles, Scotch hops, battledores, etc., at which we were all pretty expert. In this retired manner we remained about six or seven weeks, and our landlord went every evening into the city to bring us the news of the day and the evening journal.”
The “we” included young Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Christie, Mr. Choppin, probably Mr. Shopworth, an American, and M. Laborde, a scientific friend of Paine. These appear to have entered with Paine into co-operative housekeeping, though taking their chief meals at the restaurants. In the evenings they were joined by others, – the Brissots (before the arrest), Nicholas Bonneville, Joel Bar. low, Captain Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Rolands. Mystical Madame Roland dreaded Paine’s power, which she considered more adapted to pull down than to build, but has left a vivid impression of “the boldness of his conceptions, the originality of his style, the striking truths he throw out bravely among those whom they offend.” The Mr. Shapworth alluded to is mentioned in a manuscript journal of Daniel Constable, sent me by his nephew, Clair J. Grece, LL.D. This English gentleman visited Baton Rouge and Shapworth’s plantation in 1822. “Mr. S.,” he says, “has daughter married to the Governor [Robinson], has travelled in Europe, married a French lady. He is a warm friend of Thomas Paine, as is his son-in-law. He lived with Paine many months at Paris. He [Paine] was then a sober, correct gentleman in appearance and manner.” The English refugees, persecuted for selling the “Rights of Man,”were, of course, always welcomed by Paine, and poor Rickman was his guest during this summer of 179335. The following reminiscence of Paine, at a time when Gouverneur Morris was (for reasons that presently appear) reporting him to his American friends as generally drunk, was written by Rickman:
“He usually rose about seven. After breakfast he usually strayed an hour or two in the garden, where he one morning pointed out the kind of spider whose web furnished him with the first idea of constructing his iron bridge; a fine model of which, in mahogany, is preserved in Paris. The little happy circle who lived with him will ever remember those days with delight: with these select friends he would talk of his boyish days, played at chess, whist, piquet, or cribbage, and enliven the moments by many interesting anecdotes: with these he would play at marbles, scotch hops, battledores, etc.: on the broad and fine gravel walk at the upper end of the garden, and then retire to his boudoir, where he was up to his knees in letters and papers of various descriptions. Here he remained till dinner time; and unless he visited Brissot’s family, or some particular friend, in the evening, which was his frequent custom, he joined again the society of his favorites and fellow boarders, with whom his conversation was often witty and cheerful, always acute and improving, but never frivolous. Incorrupt, straightforward, and sincere, he pursued his political course in France, as everywhere else, let the government or clamor or faction of the day be what it might, with firmness, with clearness, and without a shadow of turning.”
In the spring of 1890 the present writer visited the spot. The lower front of the old mansion is divided into shops, – a Fruiterer being appropriately next the gateway, which now opens into a wide thoroughfare. Above the rooms once occupied by Paine was the sign “Ecrivain Publique,” – placed there by a Mademoiselle who wrote letters and advertisements for humble neighbors not expert in penmanship. At the end of what was once the garden is a Printer’s office, in which was a large lithograph portrait of Victor Hugo. The printer, his wife, and little daughter were folding publications of the “Extreme Left.” Near the door remains a veritable survival of the garden and its living tenants which amused Paine and his friend. There were two ancient fruit trees, of which one was dying, but the other budding in the spring sunshine. There were ancient coops with ducks, an pigeon-houses with pigeons, also rabbits, and some flowers. This little nook, of perhaps forty square feet, and its animals, had been there – so an old inhabitant told me – time out of mind. They belonged to nobody in particular; the pigeons were fed by the people around; the fowls were probably kept thereby some poultryman. There were eager groups attending every stage of the investigation. The exceptional antiquity of the mansion had been recognized by its occupants, – several families, but without curiosity, and perhaps with regret. Comparatively few had heard of Paine.
Shortly before I had visited the garden near Florence which Boccaccio’s immortal tales have kept in perennial beauty through five centuries. It may be that in the far future some brother of Boccace will bequeath to Paris as sweet a legend of the garden where beside the plague of blood the prophet of the universal Republic realized his dream in microcosm. Here gathered sympathetic spirits from America, England, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, freed from prejudices of race, rank, or nationality, striving to be mutually helpful, amusing themselves with Arcadian sports, studying nature, enriching each other by exchange of experiences. It is certain that in all the world there was no group of men and women more disinterestedly absorbed in the work of benefiting their fellow beings. They could not, however, like Boccaccio’s ladies and gentlemen “kill Death” by their witty tales; for presently beloved faces disappeared from their circle, and the cruel axe was gleaming over them.
And now the old hotel became the republican capitol of Europe. There sat an international Premier with his Cabinet, concentrated on the work of saving the Girondins. He was indeed treated by the Executive government as a Minister. It was supposed by Paine and believed by his adherents that Robespierre had for him some dislike. Paine in later years wrote of Robespierre as a “hypocrite,” and the epithet may have a significance not recognized by his readers. It is to me probable that Paine considered himself deceived by Robespierre with professions of respect, if not of friendliness before being cast into prison; a conclusion naturally based on requests from the Ministers for opinions on public affairs. The archives of the Revolution contain various evidences of this, and several papers by Paine evidently in reply to questions. We may feel certain that every subject propounded was carefully discussed in Paine’s little cosmopolitan Cabinet before his opinion was transmitted to the revolutionary Cabinet of committees. In reading the subjoined documents it must be borne in mind that Robespierre had not yet been suspected of the cruelty presently, associated with his name. The Queen and the Girondist leaders were yet alive. Of these leaders, Paine was known to be the friend, and it was of the utmost importance that he should be suavely loyal to the government that had inherited these prisoners from Marat’s time.
The first of these papers is erroneously endorsed “January 1793. Thom. Payne. Copie,” in the French State Archives36. Its reference to the defeat of the Duke of York at Dunkirk assigns its date to the late summer. It is headed, “Observations on the situation of the Powers joined against France.”
“It is always useful to know the position and the designs of one’s enemies. It is much easier to do so by combining and comparing the events, and by examining the consequences which result from them, than by forming one’s judgment by letters found or intercepted. These letters could be fabricated with the intention of deceiving, but events or circumstances have a character which is proper to them. If in the course of our political operations we mistake the designs of our enemy, it leads us to do precisely that which he desired we should do, and it happens, by the fact, but against our intentions, that we work for him.
“It appears at first sight that the coalition against France is not of the nature of those which form themselves by a treaty. It has been the work of circumstances. It is a heterogeneous mass, the parts of which dash against each other, and often neutralise themselves. They have but one single point of reunion, the re-establishment of the monarchical government in France. Two means can conduct them to the execution of this plan. The first is, to re-establish the Bourbons, and with them the Monarchy; the second, to make a division similar to that which they have made in Poland, and to reign themselves in France. The political questions to be solved are, then, to know on which of these two plans it is most probable, the united Powers will act; and which are the points of these plans on which they will agree or disagree.
“Supposing their aim to be the re-establishment of the Bourbons, the difficulty which will present itself, will be, to know who will be their Allies?
“Will England consent to the re-establishment of the compact of family in the person of the Bourbons, against whom she has machinated and fought since her existence? Will Prussia consent to re-establish the alliance which subsisted between France and Austria, or will Austria wish to re-establish the ancient alliance between France and Prussia, which was directed against her? Will Spain, or any other maritime Power, allow France and her Marine to ally themselves to England? In fine, will any of these Powers consent to furnish forces which could be directed against herself? However, all these cases present themselves in the hypothesis of the restoration of the Bourbons.
“If we suppose that their plan be the dismemberment of France, difficulties will present themselves under another form, but not of the same nature. It will no longer be question, in this case, of the Bourbons, as their position will be worse; for if their preservation is apart of their first plan, their destruction ought to enter in the second; because it is necessary for the success of the dismembering that not a single pretendant to the Crown of France should exist.
“As one must think of all the probabilities in political calculations, it is not unlikely that some of the united Powers, having in view the first of these plans, and others the second, – that this may be one of the causes of their disagreement. It is to be remembered that Russia recognised a Regency from the beginning of Spring; not one of the other Powers followed her example. The distance of Russia from France, and the different countries by which she is separated from her, leave no doubt as to her dispositions with regard to the plan of division; and as much as one can form an opinion on the circumstances, it is not her scheme.
“The coalition directed against France, is composed of two kinds of Powers. The Maritime Powers, not having the same interest as the others, will be divided, as to the execution of the project of division.
“I do not hesitate to believe that the politic of the English Government is to foment the scheme of dismembering, and the entire destruction of the Bourbon family.
“The difficulty which must arise, in this last hypothesis, between the united Maritime Powers proceeds from their views being entirely opposed,
“The trading vessels of the Northern Nations, from Holland to Russia, must pass through the narrow Channel, which, lies between Dunkirk and the coasts of England; and consequently not one of them, will allow this latter Power to consequently have forts on both sides of this Strait. The audacity with which she has seized the neutral vessels ought to demonstrate to all Nations how much her schemes increase their danger, and menace the security of their present and future commerce.
“Supposing then that the other Nations oppose the plans of England, she will be forced to cease the war with us; or, if she continues it, the Northern Nations will become interested in the safety of France.
“There are three distinct parties in England at this moment: the Government party, the Revolutionary party, and an intermedial party, which is only opposed to the war on account of the expense it entails, and the harm it does commerce and manufacture. I am speaking of the People, and not of the Parliament. The latter is divided into two parties: the Ministerial, and the Anti-Ministerial. The Revolutionary party, the intermedial party and the Anti-Ministerial party will all rejoice, publicly or privately, at the defeat of the Duke of York’s army, at Dunkirk. The intermedial party, because they hope that this defeat will finish the war. The Antiministerial party, because they hope it will overthrow the Ministry. And all the three because they hate the Duke of York. Such is the state of the different parties in England.
“Signed:
THOMAS PAINE."In the same volume of the State Archives (Paris) is the following note by Paine, with its translation:
“You mentioned to me that saltpetre was becoming scarce. I communicate to you a project of the late Captain Paul Jones, which, if successfully put in practice, will furnish you with that article.
“All the English East India ships put into St. Helena, off the coast of Africa, on their return from India to England. A great part of their ballast is saltpetre. Captain Jones, who had been at St. Helena, says that the place can be very easily taken. His proposal was to send off a small squadron for that purpose, to keep the English flag flying at port. The English vessels will continue coming in as usual. By this means it will be a long time before the Government of England can have any knowledge of what has happened. The success of this depends so much upon secrecy that I wish you would translate this yourself, and give it to Barrere.”
In the next volume (38) of the French Archives, marked “Etats Unis, 1793,” is a remarkable document (No.39), entitled “A Citizen of America to the Citizens of Europe.” The name of Paine is only pencilled on it, and it was probably written by him; but it purports to have been written in America, and is dated “Philadelphia, July 28, 1793; 18th Year of Independence.” It is a clerk’s copy, so that it cannot now be known whether the ruse of its origin in Philadelphia was due to Paine or to the government. It is an extended paper, and repeats to some extent, though not literally, what is said in the “Observations” quoted above. Possibly the government, on receiving that paper (Document 39 also), desired Paine to write it out as an address to the “Citizens of Europe.” It does not appear to have been published. The first four paragraphs of this paper, combined with the “Observations,” will suffice to show its character.
“Understanding that a proposal is intended to be made at the ensuing meeting of the Congress of the United States of America, to send Commissioners to Europe to confer with the Ministers of all the Neutral Powers, for the purpose of negociating preliminaries of Peace, I address this letter to you on that subject, and on the several matters connected therewith.
“In order to discuss this subject through all its circumstances, it will be necessary to take a review of the state of Europe, prior to the French revolution. It will from thence appear, that the powers leagued against France are fighting to attain an object, which, were it possible to be attained, would be injurious to themselves.
“This is not an uncommon error in the history of wars and governments, of which the conduct of the English government is the war against America is a striking instance. She commenced that war for the avowed purpose of subjugating America; and after wasting upwards of one hundred millions sterling, and then abandoning the object, she discovered in the course of three or four years, that the prosperity of England was increased, instead of being diminished, by the independence of America. In short, every circumstance is pregnant with some natural effect, upon which intentions and opinions have no influence; and the political error lies in misjudging what the effect will be. England misjudged it in the American war, and the reasons I shall now offer will shew, that she misjudges it in the present war. – In discussing this subject, I leave out of the question every thing respecting forms and systems of government; for as all the governments of Europe differ from each other, there is no reason that the government of France should not differ from the rest.
“The clamours continually raised in all the countries of Europe were, that the family of the Bourbons was become too powerful; that the intrigues of the court of France endangered the peace of Europe. Austria saw with a jealous eye the connection of France with Prussia; and Prussia, in her turn became jealous of the connection of France with Austria; England had wasted millions unsuccessfully in attempting to prevent the family compact with Spain; Russia disliked the alliance between France and Turkey; and Turkey became apprehensive of the inclination of France towards an alliance with Russia. Sometimes the quadruple alliance alarmed some of the powers, and at other times a contrary system alarmed others, and in all those cases the charge was always made against the intrigues of the Bourbons.”
In each of these papers a plea for the imperilled Girondins is audible. Each is a reminder that he, Thomas Paine, friend of the Brissotins, is continuing their anxious and loyal vigilance for the Republic. And during all this summer Paine had good reason to believe that his friends were safe. Robespierre was eloquently deprecating useless effusion of blood. As for Paine himself, he was not only consulted on public questions, but trusted in practical affairs. He was still able to help Americans and Englishmen who invoked his aid. Writing to Lady Smith concerning two applications of that kind, he says:
“I went into my chamber to write and sign a certificate for them, which I intended to take to the guard house to obtain their release. Just as I had finished it, a man came into my room, dressed in the Parisian uniform of a captain, and spoke to me in good English, and with a good address. He told me that two young men, Englishmen, were arrested and detained in the guard house, and that the section (meaning those who represented and acted for the section) had sent him to ask me if I knew them, in which case they would be liberated. This matter being soon settled between us, he talked to me about the Revolution, and something about the `Rights of Man,’ which he had read in English; and at parting offered me, in a polite and civil manner, his services. And who do you think the man was who offered me his services? It was no other than the public executioner, Samson, who guillotined the King and all who were guillotined in Paris, and who lived in the same street with me.”
There appeared no reason to suppose this a domiciliary visit, or that it had any relation to anything except the two Englishmen. Samson was not a detective. It soon turned out, however, that there was a serpent creeping into Paine’s little garden in the Faubourg St. Denis. He and his guests knew it not, however, until all their hopes fell with the leaves and blossoms amid which they had passed a summer to which Paine, from his prison, looked back with fond recollection.
CHAPTER V
A CONSPIRACY
[1793]“HE suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Pilate’s gallant struggle to save Jesus from lynchers survives in no kindly memorial save among the peasants of Oberammergau. It is said that the impression once made in England by the Miracle Play has left its relic in the miserable puppet-play Punch and Judy (Pontius cum Judaeis); but mean while the Church repeats, throughout Christendom, ” He suffered under Pontius Pilate.” It is almost normal in history that the brand of infamy falls on the wrong man. This is the penalty of personal eminence, and especially of eloquence. In the opening years of the French Revolution the two men in Europe who seemed omnipotent were Pitt and Robespierre. By reason of their eloquence, their ingenious defences, their fame, the columns of credit and discredit were begun in their names, and have so continued. English liberalism, remembering the imprisoned and flying writers, still repeats, “They suffered under William Pitt.” French republics transmit their legend of Condorcet, Camille Desmoulins, Brissot, Malesherbes, “They suffered under Robespierre.” The friends, disciples, biographers, of Thomas Paine have it in their creed that he suffered under both Pitt and Robespierre. It is certain that neither Pitt nor Robespierre was so strong as he appeared. Their hands cannot be cleansed, but they are historic scapegoats of innumerable sins they never committed.
Unfortunately for Robespierre’s memory, in England and America especially, those who for a century might have been the most ready to vindicate a slandered revolutionist have been confronted by the long imprisonment of the author of the “Rights of Man,”and.by the discovery of his virtual death-sentence in Robespierre’s handwriting. Louis Blanc, Robespierre’s great vindicator, could not, we may assume, explain this ugly fact, which he passes by in silence. He has proved, conclusively as I think, that Robespierre was among the revolutionists least guilty of the Terror; that he was murdered by a conspiracy of those whose cruelties he was trying to restrain; that, when no longer alive to answer, they burdened him with their crimes, as the only means of saving their heads. Robespierre’s doom was sealed when he had real power, and used it to prevent any organization of the constitutional government which might have checked revolutionary excesses. He then, because of a superstitious faith in the auspices of the Supreme Being, threw the reins upon the neck of the revolution he afterwards vainly tried to curb. Others’ who did not wish to restrain it, seized the reins and when the precipice was reached took care that Robespierre should be hurled over it. Many allegations against Robespierre have been disproved. He tried to save Danton and Camille Desmoulins, and did save seventy-three deputies whose death the potentates of the Committee of Public Safety had planned. But against him still lies that terrible sentence found in his Note Book, and reported by a Committee to the Convention: “Demand that Thomas Payne be decreed of accusation for the interests of America as much as of France.”37
The Committee on Robespierre’s papers, and especially Courtois its Chairman, suppressed some things favorable to him (published long after), and it can never be known whether they found anything further about Paine. They made a strong point of the sentence found, and added: “Why Thomas Payne more than another? Because he helped to establish the liberty of both worlds.”
An essay by Paine on Robespierre has been lost, and his opinion of the man can be gathered only from occasional remarks. After the Courtois report he had to accept the theory of Robespierre’s malevolence and hypocrisy. He then, for the first time, suspected the same hand in a previous act of hostility towards him. In August, 1793, an address had been sent to the Convention from Arras, a town in his constituency, saying that they had lost confidence in Paine. This failed of success because a counter-address came from St. Omer. Robespierre being a native of Arras, it now seemed clear that he had instigated the address. It was, however, almost certainly the work of Joseph Lebon, who, as Paine once wrote, “made the streets of Arras run with blood.” Lebon was his suppleant, and could not sit in the Convention until Paine left it.
But although Paine would appear to have ascribed his misfortunes to Robespierre at the time, he was evidently mystified by the whole thing. No word against him had ever fallen from Robespierre’s lips, and if that leader had been hostile to him why should he have excepted him from the accusations of his associates, have consulted him through the summer, and even after imprisonment, kept him unharmed for months? There is a notable sentence in Paine’s letter (from prison) to Monroe, elsewhere considered, showing that while there he had connected his trouble rather with the Committee of Public Safety than with Robespierre.
“However discordant the late American Minister Gouvernoeur Morris, and the late French Committee of Public Safety, were, it suited the purposes of both that I should be continued in arrestation. The former wished to prevent my return to America, that I should not expose his misconduct; and the latter lest I should publish to the world the history of its wickedness. Whilst that Minister and that Committee continued, I had no expectation of liberty. I speak here of the Committee of which Robespierre was a member.”38
Paine wrote this letter on September 10, 1794. Robespierre, three months before that, had ceased to attend the Committee, disavowing responsibility for its actions: Paine was not released. Robespierre, when the letter to Monroe was written, had been dead more than six months: Paine was not released. The prisoner had therefore good reason to look behind Robespierre for his enemies; and although the fatal sentence found in the Note Book, and a private assurance of Barrere, caused him to ascribe his wrongs to Robespierre, farther reflection convinced him that hands more hidden had also been at work. He knew that Robespierre was a man of measured words, and pondered the sentence that he should “be decreed of accusation for the interests of America as much as of France. In a letter written in 1802, Paine said:”There must have been a coalition in sentiment, if not in fact, between the terrorists of America and the terrorists of France, and Robespierre must have known it, or he could not have had the idea of putting America into the bill of accusation against me.” Robespierre, he remarks, assigned no reason for his imprisonment.
The secret for which Paine groped has remained hidden for a hundred years. It is painful to reveal it now, but historic justice, not only to the memory of Paine, but to that of some eminent contemporaries of his, demands that the facts be brought to light.
The appointment of Gouverneur Morris to be Minister to France, in 1792, passed the Senate by 16 to 11 votes. The President did not fail to advise him of this reluctance, and admonish him to be more cautious in his conduct. In the same year Paine took his seat in the Convention. Thus the royalist and republican tendencies, whose struggles made chronic war in Washington’s Cabinet, had their counterpart in Paris, where our Minister Morris wrote royalist, and Paine republican, manifestoes. It will have been seen, by quotations from his Diary already given, that Gouverneur Morris harbored a secret hostility towards Paine; and it is here assumed that those entries and incidents are borne in mind. The Diary shows an appearance of friendly terms between the two; Morris dines Paine and receives information from him. The royalism of Morris and humanity of Paine brought them into a common desire to save the life of Louis.
But about the same time the American Minister’s own position became a subject of anxiety to him. He informs Washington (December 28, 1792) that Genet’s appointment as Minister to the United States had not been announced to him (Morris). “Perhaps the Ministry think it is a trait of republicanism to omit those forms which were anciently used to express good will.” His disposition towards Paine was not improved by finding that it was to him Genet had reported. “I have not yet seen M. Genet,” writes Morris again, “but Mr. Paine is to introduce him to me.” Soon after this Morris became aware that the French Ministry had asked his recall, and had Paine also known this the event might have been different. The Minister’s suspicion that Paine had instigated the recall gave deadliness to his resentment when the inevitable break came between them.
The occasion of this arose early in the spring. When war had broken out between England and France, Morris, whose sympathies were with England, was eager to rid America of its treaty obligations to France. He so wrote repeatedly to Jefferson, Secretary of State. An opportunity presently occurred for acting on this idea. In reprisal for the seizure by British cruisers of American ships conveying provisions to France, French cruisers were ordered to do the like, and there were presently ninety-two captured American vessels at Bordeaux. They were not allowed to reload and go to sea lest their cargoes should be captured by England. Morris pointed out to the French Government this violation of the treaty with America, but wrote to Jefferson that he would leave it to them in Philadelphia to insist oh the treaty’s observance, or to accept the “unfettered” condition in which its violation by France left them. Consultation with Philadelphia was a slow business, however, and the troubles of the American vessels were urgent. The captains, not suspecting that the American Minister was satisfied with the treaty’s violation, were angry at his indifference about their relief, and applied to Paine. Unable to move Morris, Paine asked him “if he did not feel ashamed to take the money of the country and do nothing for it.” It was, of course, a part of Morris’ scheme for ending the treaty to point out its violation and the hardships wrote to the French Minister a statement of the complaint.
“I do not [he adds] pretend to interfere in the internal concerns of the French Republic, and I am persuaded that the Convention has had weighty reasons for laying upon Americans the restriction of which the American captains complain. The result will nevertheless be that this prohibition will severely aggrieve the parties interested, and put an end to the commerce between France and the United States.”
The note is half-hearted, but had the captains known it was written they might have been more patient. Morris owed his subsequent humiliation partly to his bad manners. The captains went off to Paine, and proposed to draw up a public protest against the American Minister. Paine advised against this, and recommended a petition to the Convention. This was offered on August 22d. In this the captains said: “We, who know your political situation, do not come to you to demand the rigorous execution of the treaties of alliance which unite us to you. We confine ourselves to asking for the present, to carry provisions to your colonies.” To this the Convention promptly and favorably responded.
It was a double humiliation to Morris that the first important benefit gained by Americans since his appointment should be secured without his help, and that it should come through Paine. And it was a damaging blow to his scheme of transferring to England our alliance with France. A “violation” of the treaty excused by the only sufferers could not be cited as “releasing” the United States. A cruel circumstance for Morris was that the French Minister wrote (October 14th): “You must be satisfied, sir, with the manner in which the request presented by the American captains from Bordeaux, has been received” – and so forth. Four days before, Morris had written to Jefferson, speaking of the thing as mere “mischief,” and belittling the success, which “only served an ambition so contemptible that I shall draw over the veil of oblivion.”
The “contemptible ambition” thus veiled from Paine’s friend, Jefferson, was revealed by Morris to others. Some time before (June 25th), he had written to Robert Morris:
“I suspected that Paine was intriguing against me, although he put on a face of attachment. Since that period I am confirmed in the idea, for he came to my house with Col. Oswald, and being a little more drunk than usual, behaved extremely ill, and through his insolence I discovered clearly his vain ambition.”
This was probably written after Paine’s rebuke already quoted. It is not likely that Colonel Oswald would have taken a tipsy man eight leagues out to Morris’ retreat, Sainport, on business, or that the tipsy man would remember the words of his rebuke two years after, when Paine records them in his letter to Washington. At any rate, if Morris saw no deeper into Paine’s physical than into his mental condition, the “insolent” words were those of soberness. For Paine’s private letters prove him ignorant of any intrigue against Morris, and under an impression that the Minister had himself asked for recall; also that, instead of being ambitious to succeed Morris, he was eager to get out of France and back to America. The first expression of French dissatisfaction with Morris had been made through De Ternant, (February 20th, 1793,) whom he had himself been the means of sending as Minister to the United States. The positive recall was made through Genet39. It would appear that Morris must have had sore need of a scapegoat to fix on poor Paine, when his intrigues with the King’s agents, his trust of the King’s money, his plot for a second attempt of the King to escape, his concealment of royalist leaders in his house, had been his main ministerial performances for some time after his appointment. Had the French known half as much as is now revealed in Morris’ Diary, not even his office could have shielded him from arrest. That the executive there knew much of it, appears in the revolutionary archives. There is reason to believe that Paine, instead of intriguing against Morris, had, in ignorance of his intrigues, brought suspicion on himself by continuing his intercourse with the Minister. The following letter of Paine to Barrere, chief Committeeman of Public Safety, dated September 5th, shows him protecting Morris while he is trying to do something for the American captains.
“I send you the papers you asked me for.
“The idea you have to send Commissioners to Congress, and of which you spoke to me yesterday, is excellent, and very necessary at this moment. Mr. Jefferson, formerly Minister of the United States in France, and actually Minister for Foreign Affairs at Congress, is an ardent defender of the interests of France. Gouverneur Morris, who is here now, is badly disposed towards you. I believe he has expressed the wish to be recalled. The reports which he will make on his arrival will not be to the advantage of France. This event necessitates the sending direct of Commissioners from the Convention. Morris is not popular in America. He has set the Americans who are here against him, as also the Captains of that Nation who have come from Bordeaux, by his negligence with regard to the affair they had to treat about with the Convention. Between us [sic] he told them: `That they had thrown themselves into the lion’s mouth, and it was for them to get out of it as best they could. I shall return to America on one of the vessels which will start from Bordeaux in the month of October. This was the project I had formed, should the rupture not take place between America and England; but now it is necessary for me to be there as soon as possible. The Congress will require a great deal of information, independently of this. It will soon be seven years that I have been absent from America, and my affairs in that countey have suffered considerably through my absence. My house and farm buildings have been entirely destroyed through an accidental fire.
“Morris has many relations in America, who are excellent patriots. I enclose you a letter which I received from his brother, General Louis Morris, who was a member of the Congress at the time of the Declaration of Independence. You will see by it that he writes like a good patriot. I only mention this so that you may know the true state of things. It will be fit to have respect for Gouverneur Morris, on account of his relations, who, as I said above, are excellent patriots.
“There are about 45 American vessels at Bordeaux, at the present moment. If the English Government wished to take revenge on the Americans, these vessels would be very much exposed during their passage. The American Captains left Paris yesterday. I advised them, on leaving, to demand a convoy of the Convention, in case they heard it said that the English had begun reprisals against the Americans, if only to conduct as far as the Bay of Biscay, at the expense of the American Government. But if the Convention determines to send Commissioners to Congress, they will be sent in a ship of the line. But it would be better for the Commissioners to go in one of the best American sailing vessels, and for the ship of the line to serve as a convoy; it could also serve to convoy the ships that will return to France charged with flour. I am sorry that we cannot converse together, but if you could give me a rendezvous, where I could see Mr. Otto, I shall be happy and ready to be there. If events force the American captains to demand a convoy, it will be to me that they will write on the subject, and not to Morris, against whom they have grave reasons of complaint.
Your friend, etc.
"THOMAS PAINE."40This is the only letter written by Paine to any one in France about Gouverneur Morris, so far as I can discover, and not knowing French he could only communicate in writing. The American Archives are equally without anything to justify the Minister’s suspicion that Paine was intriguing against him, even after his outrageous conduct about the captains. Morris had laid aside the functions of a Minister to exercise those of a treatymaking government. During this excursion into presidential and senatorial power, for the injury of the country to which he was commissioned, his own countrymen in France were without an official Minister, and in their distress imposed ministerial duties on Paine. But so far from wishing to supersede Morris, Paine, in the above letter to Barrere, gives an argument for his retention, namely, that if he goes home he will make reports disadvantageous to France. He also asks respect for Morris on account of his relations, “excellent patriots.”
Barrere, to whom Paine’s letter is written, was chief of the Committee of Public Safety, and had held that powerful position since its establishment, April 6, 1793. To this all-powerful Committee of Nine, Robespierre was added July 27th. On the day that Paine wrote the letter, September 5th, Barrere opened the Terror by presenting a report in which it is said, “Let us make terror the order of the day!” This Barrere was a sensualist, a crafty orator, a sort of eel which in danger turned into a snake. His “supple genius,” as Louis Blanc expresses it, was probably appreciated by Morris, who was kept well informed as to the secrets of the Committee of Public Safety. This omnipotent Committee had supervision of foreign affairs and appointments. At this time the Minister of Foreign Affairs was Deforgues, whose secretary was the M. Otto alluded to in Paine’s letter to Barrere. Otto spoke English fluently; he had been in the American Legation. Deforgues became Minister June 5th, on the arrest of his predecessor (Lebrun), and was anxious lest he should follow Lebrun to prison also, as he ultimately did. Deforgues and his secretary, Otto, confided to Morris their strong desire to be appointed to America, Genet having been recalled.41
Despite the fact that Morris’ hostility to France was well known, he had become an object of awe. So long as his removal was daily expected in reply to a request twice sent for his recall, Morris was weak, and even insulted. But when ship after ship came in without such recall, and at length even with the news that the President had refused the Senate’s demand for Morris’ entire correspondence, everything was changed42. “So long,” writes Morris to Washington, “as they believed in the success of their demand, they treated my representations with indifference and contempt; but at last, hearing nothing from their minister on that subject, or, indeed, on any other, they took it into their heads that I was immovable, and made overtures for conciliation.” It must be borne in mind that at this time America was the only ally of France; that already there were fears that Washington was feeling his way towards a treaty with England. Soon after the overthrow of the monarchy Morris had hinted that the treaty between the United States and France, having been made with the King, might be represented by the English Ministry in America as void under the revolution; and that “it would be well to evince a degree of good will to America.” When Robespierre first became a leader he had particular charge of diplomatic affairs. It is stated by Frederic Masson that Robespierre was very anxious to recover for the republic the initiative of the alliance with the United States, which was credited to the King; and “although their Minister Gouverneur Morris was justly suspected, and the American republic was at that time aiming only to utilize the condition of its ally, the French republic cleared it at a cheap rate of its debts contracted with the King.”43 Such were the circumstances which, when Washington seemed determined to force Morris on France, made this Minister a power. Lebrun, the ministerial predecessor of Deforgues, may indeed have been immolated to placate Morris, who having been, under his administration, subjected to a domiciliary visit, had gone to reside in the country. That was when Morris’ removal was supposed near; but now his turn came for a little reign of terror on his own account. In addition to Deforgues’ fear of Lebrun’s fate, should he anger Washington’s immovable representative, he knew that his hope of succeeding Genet in America must depend on Morris. The terrors and schemes of Deforgues and Otto brought them to the feet of Morris.
About the time when the chief of the Committee of Public Safety, Barrere, was consulting Paine about sending Commissioners to America, Deforgues was consulting Morris on the same point. The interview was held shortly after the humiliation which Morris had suffered, in the matter of the captains, and the defeat of his scheme for utilizing their grievance to release the United States from their alliance. The American captains had appointed Paine their Minister, and he had been successful. Paine and his clients had not stood in awe of Morris; but he now had the strength of a giant, and proceeded to use it like a giant.
The interview with Deforgues was not reported by Morris to the Secretary of State (Paine’s friend, Jefferson), but in a confidential letter to Washington, – so far as was prudent.
“I have insinuated [he writes] the advantages which might result from an early declaration on the part of the new minister that, as France has announced the determination not to meddle with the interior affairs of other nations, he can know only thegovernment of America. In union with this idea, I told the minister that I had observed an overruling influence in their affairs which seemed to come from the other side of the channel, and at the same time had traced the intention to excite a seditious spirit in America; that it was impossible to be on a friendly footing with such persons, but that at present a different spirit seemed to prevail, etc. This declaration produced the effect I intended.”44
In thus requiring that the new minister to America shall recognize only the “government” (and not negotiate with Kentucky, as Genet had done), notice is also served on Deforgues that the Convention must in future deal only with the American Minister, and not with Paine or sea-captains in matters affecting his countrymen. The reference to an influence from the other side of the channel could only refer to Paine, as there were then no Englishmen in Paris outside his garden in the Faubourg St. Denis. By this ingenious phrase Morris already disclaims jurisdiction over Paine, and suggests that he is an Englishman worrying Washington through Genet. This was a clever hint in another way. Genet, now recalled, evidently for the guillotine, had been introduced to Morris by Paine, who no doubt had given him letters to eminent Americans. Paine had sympathized warmly with the project of the Kentuckians to expel the Spanish from the Mississippi, and this was patriotic American doctrine even after Kentucky was admitted into the Union (June 1, 1792). He had corresponded with Dr. O’Fallon, a leading Kentuckian on the subject. But things had changed, and when Genet went out with his blank commissions he found himself confronted with a proclamation of neutrality which turned his use of them to sedition. Paine’s acquaintance with Genet, and his introductions, could now be plausibly used by Morris to involve him. The French Minister is shown an easy way of relieving his country from responsibility for Genet, by placing it on the deputy from “the other side of the channel.”
“This declaration produced the effect I intended,” wrote Morris. The effect was indeed swift. On October 3d, Amar, after the doors of the Convention were locked, read the memorable accusation against the Girondins, four weeks before their execution. In that paper he denounced Brissot for his effort to save the King, for his intimacy with the English, for injuring the colonies by his labors for negro emancipation! In this denunciation Paine had the honor to be included.
“At that same time the Englishman Thomas Paine, called by the faction [Girondin] to the honor of representing the French nation, dishonored himself by supporting the opinion of Brissot, and by promising us in his fable the dissatisfaction of the United States of America, our natural allies, which he did not blush to depict for us as full of veneration and gratitude for the tyrant of France.”
On October 19th the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Deforgues, writes to Morris:
“I shall give the Council an account of the punishable conduct of their agent in the United States [Genet], and I can assure you beforehand that they will regard the strange abuse of their confidence by this agent, as I do, with the liveliest indignation. The President of the United States has done justice to our sentiments in attributing the deviations of the citizen Genet to causes entirely foreign to his instructions, and we hope that the measures to be taken will more and more convince the head and members of your Government that so far from having authorized the proceedings and manoeuvres of Citizen Genet our only aim has been to maintain between the two nations the most perfect harmony.”
One of “the measures to be taken” was the imprisonment of Paine, for which Amar’s denunciation had prepared the way. But this was not so easy. For Robespierre had successfully attacked Amar’s report for extending its accusations beyond the Girondins. How then could an accusation be made against Paine, against whom no charge could be brought, except that he had introduced a French minister to his friends in America! A deputy must be formally accused by the Convention before he could be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. An indirect route must be taken to reach the deputy secretly accused by the American Minister, and the latter had pointed it out by alluding to Paine as an influence “from across the channel.” There was a law passed in June for the imprisonment of foreigners belonging to countries at war with France. This was administered by the Committees. Paine had not been liable to this law, being a deputy, and never suspected of citizenship in the country which had outlawed him, until Morris suggested it. Could he be got out of the Convention the law might be applied to him without necessitating any public accusation and trial, or anything more than an announcement to the Deputies.
Such was the course pursued. Christmas day was celebrated by the terrorist Bourdon de l’Oise with a denunciation of Paine:
“They have boasted the patriotism of Thomas Paine. Eh bien! Since the Brissotins disappeared from the bosom of this Convention he has not set foot in it. And I know that he has intrigued with a former agent of the bureau of Foreign Affairs.”
This accusation could only have come from the American Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs – from Gouverneur Morris and Deforgues. Genet was the only agent of Deforgues office with whom Paine could possibly have been connected; and what that connection was the reader nows. That accusation is associated with the terrorist’s charge that Paine had declined to unite with the murderous decrees of the Convention.
After the speech of Bourdon de l’Oise, Bentabole moved the “exclusion of foreigners from every public function during the war.” Bentabole was a leading member of the Committee of General
Surety. “The Assembly,” adds The Moniteur, “decreed that no foreigner should be admitted to represent the French people.” The Committee of General Surety assumed the right to regard Paine as an Englishman; and as such out of the Convention, and consequently under the law of June against aliens of hostile nations. He was arrested next day, and on December 28th committed to the Luxembourg prison.
CHAPTER VI
A TESTIMONY UNDER THE GUILLOTINE
[1793-1794]WHILE Paine was in prison the English gentry were gladdened by a rumor that he had been guillotined, and a libellous leaflet of “The Last Dying Words of Thomas Paine,” appeared in London. Paine was no less confident than his enemies that his execution was certain – after the denunciation in Amar’s report, October 3d – and did indeed utter what may be regarded as his dying words – “The Age of Reason.” This was the task which he had from year to year adjourned to his maturest powers45, and to it he dedicates what brief remnant of life may await him. That completed, it will be time to die with his comrades, awakened by his pen to a dawn now red with their blood.
The last letter I find written from the old Pompadour mansion is to Jefferson, under date of October 20th:
“DEAR SIR,
“I wrote you by Captain Dominick who was to sail from Havre about the 20th of this month. This will probably be brought you by Mr. Barlow or Col. Oswald. Since my letter by Dominick I am every day more convinced and impressed with the propriety of Congress sending Commissioners to Europe to confer with the Ministers of the jesuitical Powers on the means of terminating the war. The enclosed printed paper will shew there are a variety of subjects to be taken into consideration which did not appear at first, all of which have some tendency to put an end to the war. I see not how this war is to terminate if some intermediate power does not step forward. There is now no prospect that France can carry revolutions thro’ Europe on the one hand, or that the combined powers can conquer France on the other hand. It is a sort of defensive War on both sides. This being the case how is the War to close? Neither side will ask for. peace though each may wish it. I believe that England and Holland are tired of the war. Their Commerce and Manufactures have suffered most exceedingly – and besides this it is to them a war without an object. Russia keeps her self at a distance, I cannot help repeating my wish that Congress would send Commissioners, and I wish also that yourself would venture once more across the Ocean as one of them. If the Commissioners rendezvous at Holland they would – then know what steps to take. They could call Mr. Pinckney to their Councils, and it would be of use, on many accounts, that one of them should come over from Holland to France. Perhaps a long truce, were it proposed by the neutral Powers, would have all the effects of a Peace, without the difficulties attending the adjustment of all the forms of Peace.
“Yours affectionately
"THOMAS PAINE."46Thus has finally faded the dream of Paine’s life – an international republic.
It is notable that in this letter Paine makes no mention of his own danger. He may have done so in the previous letter, unfound, to which he alludes. Why he made no attempt to escape after Amar’s report seems a mystery, especially as he was assisting others to leave the country. Two of his friends, Johnson and Choppin – the last to part from him in the old garden, – escaped to Switzerland.
Johnson will be remembered as the young man who attempted suicide on hearing of Marat’s menaces against Paine. Writing to Lady Smith of these two friends, he says:
“He [Johnson recovered, and being anxious to get out of France, a passport was obtained for him and Mr. Choppin; they received it late in the evening, and set off the next morning for Basle, before four, from which place I had a letter from them, highly pleased with their escape from France, into which they had entered with an enthusiasm of patriotic devotion. Ah, France! thou hast ruined the character of a revolution virtuously begun, and destroyed those who produced it. I might also say like job’s servant, ‘and I only am escaped.’]; which, with three other persons, whose names I do not now recollect, and including Paine and myself, made in all nineteen.”
– Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iii, Introduction, p.xiii-xiv.
Convention to the United States, confided to me by his (p.xii) son, George Clinton Genet of New York, I find a memorandum of great historical interest, which may be inserted here in advance of the monograph I hope to prepare concerning that much-wronged ambassador. In this memorandum Genet – a brother of Madame Campan – states that his appointment to the United States was in part because of the position his family had held at Court, and with a view to the banishment of the royal family to that country. (It had already been arranged that Paine should move for this in the Convention.) I now quote Genet:Among the manuscripts of Genet, the first Minister sent by the
“Roux Facillac, who had been very intimate in my father’s family at Versailles, met me one morning [January 14, 1793] and wished me to spend the evening at Le Brun’s, where I had been invited. He accompanied me there and we met Brissot, Guadet, Leonnet, Ducos, Fauchet, Thomas Paine, and most of the Gironde leaders. . . . Tom Paine, who did not pretend to understand French, took no part in the conversation, and sat quietly sipping his claret.”Ask Paine, Genet,” said Brissot, “what effect the execution of Capet would have in America?”Paine replied to my enquiry by simply saying “bad, very bad.” The next day Paine presented to the Convention his celebrated letter demanding in the name of Liberty, and the people of the United States, that Louis should be sent to the United States. Vergniaux enquired of me what effect I thought it would have in Europe, I replied in a few words that it would gratify the enemies of France who had not forgiven Louis the acceptance of the Constitution nor the glorious results of the American Revolution. . . . ‘Genet,’ continued Le Brun, ‘how would you like to go to the United States and take Capet and his family with you?’ ”
The next day, January 15, Genet was appointed by Le Brun (Minister of Foreign Affairs), and Paine’s appeal was made in the Convention; but there is reason to believe that Le Brun’s servant was a spy; and the conversation, reported to the Jacobins soon after its occurrence, “contributed,” Genet believed, “to the early fall of Louis.” – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xi-xii.
So called from the high benches on which these members sat. Theseats of the Girondists on the floor were called the “Plain,” and after their overthrow the “Marsh.”
Upwards of three hundred voted with Paine, who says that themajority by which death was carried, unconditionally, was twenty-five. As a witness who had watched the case, his testimony may correct the estimate of Carlyle
"History of France," vi., p.136."Venant d'un democrate tel que Thomas Paine, d'un homme qui avaitvecu parmi les Americains, d’un penseur, cette declaration parut si dangereuse
a Marat que, pour en detruire l'effet, il n'hesita pasa s’ecrier: ‘Je denonce le truchement. Je soutiens que ce n’est point l`a l’opinion de Thomas Paine. C’est une traduction infidele.’ ” [“The coming of a democrat such as Thomas Paine, of a man who had lived among the Americans, of a thinker, this declaration appeared so dangerous to Marat that, to destroy the effect of it, he didn’t hesitate to exclaim: ‘I denounce the interpreter. I maintain that it is not the opinion of Thomas Paine. It is an unfaithful translation.’” – Digital Editor’s Translation.] – Louis Blanc. See also “Histoire Parliamentaire,” xxiii., p. 250."Histoire de la Revolution," vol. viii., p.96.vol. xxv."Le Departement des Affaires Etrangeres pendant la Revolution,1787-1809.” Par Frederic Masson, Bibliothecaire du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres. Paris, 1877, p, 273.
Morris’ “Diary,” ii., pp.19, 27, 32.
“The same spirit of fortitude that insured success to America will insure it to France, for it is impossible to conquer a nation determined to be free . . . . Man is ever a stranger to the ways by which Providence regulates the order of things. The interference of foreign despots may serve to introduce into their own enslaved countries the principles they come to oppose. Liberty and equality are blessings too great to be the inheritance of France alone. It is honour to her to be their first champion; and she may now say to her enemies, with a mighty voice,
‘O, ye Austrians, ye Prussians! ye who now turn your bayonets against us, it is for you, it is for all Europe, it is for all mankind, and not for France alone, that she raises the standard of Liberty and Equality!’ ”
- This letter, dated September 26, 1792, appears in the Miles Correspondence (London, 1890). There are indications that Miles was favorably disposed towards Paine, and on that account, perhaps, was subjected to influence by his superiors. As an example of the way in which just minds were poisoned towards Paine, a note of Miles may be mentioned. He says he was “told by Col. Bosville, a declared friend of Paine, that his manners and conversation were coarse, and he loved the brandy bottle.” But just as this Miles Correspondence was appearing in London, Dr. Grece found the manuscript diary of Rickman, who had discovered (as two entries show) that this “declared friend of Paine,” Col. Bosville, and professed friend of himself, was going about uttering injurious falsehoods concerning him (Rickman), seeking to alienate his friends at the moment when he most needed them. Rickman was a bookseller engaged in circulating Paine’s works. There is little doubt that this wealthy Col. Bosville was at the time unfriendly to the radicals. He was staying in Paris on Paine’s political credit, while depreciating him.
– Paine’s address to the Convention (September 25, 1792) after taking his seat.
- In a copy of the first edition of “The Rights of Man,” which I bought in London, I found, as a sort of book-mark, a bill for 1-L-. 6s. 8d., two quarters’ window-tax, due from Mr. Williamson, Upper Fitzroy Place. Windows closed with bricks are still seen in some of the gloomiest parts of London. I have in manuscript a bitter anathema of the time:
“God made the Light, and saw that it was good Pitt laid a tax on it, – G_d – his blood!”
Zachariah Wilkes did not fail to return, or Paine to greet him with safety, and the words, “There is yet English blood in England.” But here Landor passes off into an imaginative picture of villages rejoicing at the fall of Robespierre. Paine himself had then been in prison seven months; so we can only conjecture the means by which Zachariah was liberated. – Landor’s Works, London, 1853, i., p. 296.
The first trial after Paine’s, that of Thomas Spence (February 26, 1793), for selling “The Rights of Man,” failed through a flaw in the indictment, but the mistake did not occur again. At the same time William Holland was awarded a year’s imprisonment and -L-100 fine for selling “Letter to the Addressers.” H. D. Symonds, for publishing “Rights of Man,” -L-20 fine and two years; for “Letter to the Addressers,” one year, -L-100 fine, with sureties in -L-1,000 for three years, and imprisonment till the fine be paid and sureties given. April 17, 1793, Richard Phillips, printer, Leicester, eighteen months. May 8th, J. Ridgway, London, selling “Rights of Man,” -L-100 and one year; “Letter to the Addressers,” one year, -L-100 fine; in each case sureties in -L-1,000, with imprisonment until fines paid and sureties given. Richard Peart, “Rights” and “Letter,” three months. William Belcher, “Rights” and “Letter,” three months. Daniel Holt, -L-50 four years. Messrs. Robinson, -L-200. Eaton and Thompson, the latter in Birmingham, were acquitted. Clio Rickman escaped punishment (p.28) by running over to Paris. Dr. Currie (1793 ) writes: “The prosecutions that are commenced all over England against printers, publishers, etc., would astonish you; and most of these are for offences committed many months ago. The printer of the Manchester Herald has had seven different indictments preferred against him for paragraphs in his paper; and six different indictments for selling or disposing of six different copies of Paine, – all previous to the trial of Paine. The man was opulent, supposed worth -L-20,000; but these different actions will ruin him, as they were intended to do.’ –”Currie’s Life,” i., p.185. See Buckle’s “History of Civilisation,” etc., American ed., p.352. In the cases where “gentlemen” were found distributing the works the penalties were ferocious. Fische Palmer was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Thomas Muir, for advising persons to read “the works of that wretched outcast Paine” (the Lord Advocate’s words) was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. This sentence was hissed. The tipstaff being ordered to take those who hissed into custody, replied: “My lord, they’re all hissing.”
“Parl. Hist.,” xxxii., p.383.
There are two Paine pitchers in the Museum at Brighton, England. Both were made at Leeds, one probably before Paine’s trial, since it presents a respectable full-length portrait, holding in his hand a book, and beneath, the words: “Mr. Thomas Paine, Author of The Rights of Man.” The other shows a serpent with Paine’s head, two sides being adorned with the following lines:
“God save the King, and all his subjects too, Likewise his forces and commanders true, May he their rights forever hence Maintain Against all strife occasioned by Tom Paine.”
“Prithee Tom Paine why wilt thou meddling be In others’ business which concerns not thee; For while thereon thou dost extend thy cares Thou dost at home neglect thine own affairs.”
“God save the King!”
“Observe the wicked and malicious man Projecting all the mischief that he can.”
- When William Pitt died in 1806, – crushed under disclosures in the impeachment of Lord Melville, – the verdict of many sufferers was expressed in an “Epitaph Impromptu” (MS.) found among the papers of Thomas Rickman. It has some historic interest.
“Reader! with eye indignant view this bier; The foe of all the human race lies here. With talents small, and those directed, too, Virtue and truth and wisdom to subdue, He lived to every noble motive blind, And died, the execration of mankind.
“Millions were butchered by his damned plan To violate each sacred right of man; Exulting he o’er earth each misery hurled, And joyed to drench in tears and blood, the world.
“Myriads of beings wretched he has made By desolating war, his favourite trade, Who, robbed of friends and dearest ties, are left Of every hope and happiness bereft.
“In private life made up of fuss and pride, Not e ’en his vices leaned to virtue’s side; Unsound, corrupt, and rotten at the core, His cold and scoundrel heart was black all o’er; Nor did one passion ever move his mind That bent towards the tender, warm, and kind.
“Tyrant, and friend to war! we hail the day When Death, to bless mankind, made thee his prey, And rid the earth of all could earth disgrace, The foulest, bloodiest scourge of man’s oppressed race.”
- Paine found warm welcome in the home of Achille Duchatelet, who with him had first proclaimed the Republic, and was now a General. Madame Duchatelet was an English lady of rank, Charlotte Comyn, and English was fluently spoken in the family. They resided at Auteuil, not far from the Abbe Moulet, who preserved an arm-chair with the inscription, Benjamin Franklin hic sedebat. Paine was a guest of the Duchatelets soon after he got to work in the Convention, as I have just discovered by a letter addressed “To Citizen Le Brun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paris.”
“Auteuil, Friday, the 4th December, 1792.
“I enclose an Irish newspaper which has been sent me from Belfast. It contains the Address of the Society of United Irishmen of Dublin (of which Society I am a member) to the volunteers of Ireland. None of the English newspapers that I have seen have ventured to republish this Address, and as there is no other copy of it than this which I send you, I request you not to let it go out of your possession. Before I received this newspaper I had drawn up a statement of the affairs of Ireland, which I had communicated to my friend General Duchatelet at Auteuil, where I now am. I wish to confer with you on that subject, but as I do not speak French, and as the matter requires confidence, General Duchatelet has desired me to say that if you can make it convenient to dine with him and me at Auteuil, he will with pleasure do the office of (p.xv) interpreter. I send this letter by my servant, but as it may not be convenient to you to give an answer directly, I have told him not to wait.
THOMAS PAINE."It will be noticed that Paine now keeps his servant, and drives to the Mayor’s dinner in a hackney coach. A portrait painted in Paris about this time, now owned by Mr. Alfred Howlett of Syracuse, N. Y., shows him in elegant costume
It is mournful to reflect, even at this distance, that only a little later both Paine and his friend General Duchatelet were prisoners. The latter poisoned himself in prison (1794). – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iii, Introduction, p.xiv-xv.
I have a little scrap of his writing (early 1792) which appears to be from the draft of a note to one of the associations in London, respecting the Society of United Irishmen, whose Declaration was issued in October, 1791:
“I have the honor of presenting the Gentlemen present a letter I have received from the United Irishmen of Dublin informing me of my having been elected an honorary member of their Society. By this adoption of me as one of their body I have the pleasure of considering myself on their” – [caetera desunt].
– Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.viii..
“It was stipulated in the treaty of commerce between France and England, concluded at Paris (1786) that the sending away an ambassador by either party, should be taken as an act of hostility by the other party. The declaration of war (February, 1793) by the Convention . . . was made in exact conformity to this article in the treaty; for it was not a declaration of war against England, but a declaration that the French republic is in war with England; the first act of hostility having been committed by England. The declaration was made on Chauvelin’s return to France, and in consequence of it.” – Paine’s “Address to the People of France” (1797). The words of the declaration of war, following the list of injuries, are: “La Convention Nationale declare, au nom de la nation Franc,aise, qu’attendu les actes multiplies et d’agressions ci-dessus mentionnes, la republique Franc,aise est en guerre avec le roi d’Angleterre.” [“The National Convention declared, in the name of the French nation, that for the above mentioned multiplied acts of aggression, the French Republic is in war with the king of England.” – Digital Editor’s Translation.] The solemn protest of Lords Lauderdale, Lansdowne, and Derby, February 1st, against the address in answer to the royal message, before France had spoken, regards that address as a demonstration of universal war. The facts and the situation are carefully set forth by Louis Blanc, “Histoire de la Revolution,” tome viii., p.93 seq.
See Louis Blanc’s “Histoire,” etc., tome viii,, p.100, for the principal authorities concerning this incident. Annual Register, 1793, ch. vi.; “Memoires tires des papiers d’un homme d’Etat.,” ii., p.157; “Memoires de Dumouriez,” t. iii., p.384.
“Histoire de la Convention Nationale,” p.50. Durand-Maillane was “the silent member” of the Convention, but a careful observer and well-informed witness. I follow him and Louis Blanc in relating the fate of the Paine-Condorcet Constitution.
This Declaration, submitted by Condorcet, April 17th, being largely the work of Paine, is here translated: The end of all union of men in society being maintenance of their natural rights, civil and political, these rights should be the basis of the social pact: their recognition and their declaration ought to precede the Constitution which secures and guarantees them.
The natural rights, civil and political, of men are liberty, equality, security, property, social protection, and resistance to oppression.
Liberty consists in the power to do whatever is not contrary to the rights of others; thus, the natural rights of each man has no limits other than those which secure to other members of society enjoyment of the same rights.
The preservation of liberty depends on the sovereignty of the Law, which is the expression of the general will. Nothing unforbidden by law can be impeached, and none may be constrained to do what it does not command.
Every man is free to make known his thought and his opinions.
Freedom of the press (and every other means of publishing one’s thoughts) cannot be prohibited, suspended, or limited.
Every citizen shall be free in the exercise of his worship [culte].
Equality consists in the power of each to enjoy the same rights.
The Law should be equal for all, whether in recompense, punishment, or restraint.
All citizens are admissible to all public positions, employments, and functions. Free peoples can recognise no grounds of preference except talents and virtues.
Security consists in the protection accorded by society to each citizen for the preservation of his person, property, and rights.
None should be sued, accused, arrested, or detained, save in cases determined by the law, and in accordance with forms prescribed by it. Every other act against a (p.40) citizen is arbitrary and null.
Those who solicit, promote, sign, execute or cause to be executed such arbitrary acts are culpable, and should be punished.
Citizens against whom the execution of such acts is attempted have the right of resistance by force. Every citizen summoned or arrested by the authority of law, and in the forms prescribed by it, should instantly obey; he renders himself guilty by resistance.
Every man being presumed innocent until declared guilty, should his arrest be judged indispensable, all rigor not necessary to secure his person should be severely repressed by law.
None should be punished save in virtue of a law established and promulgated previous to the offence, and legally applied.
A law that should punish offences committed before its existence would be an arbitrary Act. Retroactive effect given to any law is a crime.
Law should award only penalties strictly and evidently necessary to the general security; they should be proportioned to the offence and useful to society.
The right of property consists in a man’s being master in the disposal, at his will, of his goods, capital, income, and industry.
No kind of work, commerce, or culture can be interdicted for any one; he may make, sell, and transport every species of production.
Every man may engage his services, and his time; but he cannot sell himself; his person is not an alienable property.
No one may be deprived of the least portion of his property without his consent, unless because of public necessity, legally determined, exacted openly, and under the condition of a just indemnity in advance.
No tax shall be established except for the general utility, and to relieve public needs. All citizens have the right to co-operate, (p.41) personally or by their representatives, in the establishment of public contributions.
Instruction is tire need of all, and society owes it equally to all its members.
Public succors are a sacred debt of society, and it is for the law to determine their extent and application.
The social guarantee of the rights of man rests on the national sovereignty.
This sovereignty is one, indivisible, imprescriptible, and inalienable.
It resides essentially in the whole people, and each citizen has an equal right to co-operate in its exercise.
No partial assemblage of citizens, and no individual may attribute to themselves sovereignty, to exercise authority and fill any public function, without a formal delegation by the law.
Social security cannot exist where the limits of public administration are not clearly determined by law, and where the responsibility of all public functionaries is not assured.
All citizens are bound to co-operate in this guarantee, and to enforce the law when summoned in its name.
Men united in society should have legal means of resisting oppression. In every free government the mode of resisting different acts of oppression should be regulated by the Constitution.
It is oppression when a law violates the natural rights, civil and political, which it should ensure. It is oppression when the law is violated by public officials in its application to individual cases. It is oppression when arbitrary acts violate the rights of citizens against the terms of the law.
A people has always the right to revise, reform, and change its Constitution. One generation has no right to bind future generations, and all heredity in offices is absurd and tyrannical.
“Les rois, les aristocrates, les tyrants qu’ils soient, sont des esclaves revoltes contre le souverain de la terre, qui est le genre humain, et contre le legislateur de l’univers, qui est la nature.” [“The kings, the aristocrats, the tyrants that they are, are slaves revolted against the sovereigns of the earth who are human kind, and against the legislator of the universe who is nature.” – Digital Editor’s Translation.] – Robespierre’s final article of “Rights,” adopted by the Jacobins, April 21,1793. Should not slaves revolt?
“I observed in the French revolutions that they always proceeded by stages, and made each stage a stepping stone to another. The Convention, to amuse the people, voted a constitution, and then voted to suspend the practical establishment of it till after the war, and in the meantime to carry on a revolutionary government. When Robespierre fell they proposed bringing forward the suspended Constitution, and apparently for this purpose appointed a committee to frame what they called organic laws, and these organic laws turned out to be a new Constitution (the Directory Constitution which was in general a good one). When Bonaparte overthrew this Constitution he got himself appointed first Consul for ten years, then for life, and now Emperor with an hereditary succession.” – Paine to Jefferson. MS. (Dec. 27, 1804). The Paine-Condorcet Constitution is printed in AEuvres Completes de Condorcet, vol. xviii. That which superseded it may be read (the Declaration of Rights omitted) in the”Constitutional History of France,” By Henry C. Lockwood. (New York, 1890). It is, inter alia, a sufficient reason for describing the latter as revolutionary, that it provides that a Convention, elected by a majority of the departments, and a tenth part of the primaries, to revise or alter the Constitution, shall be “formed in like manner as the legislatures, and unite in itself the highest power.” In other words, instead of being limited to constitutional revision, may exercise all legislative and other functions, just as the existing Convention was doing.
“AEuvres Completes de Condorcet,” Paris, 1801, t. xvi., p.16: “La Republique Franc,aise aux hommes libres” [“The French Republic to Free Men.”] In 1794, when Paine was in prison, a pamphlet was issued by the revolutionary government, entitled”An Answer to the Declaration of the King of England, respecting his Motives for Carrying on the Present War, and his Conduct towards France.” This anonymous pamphlet, which is in English, replies to the royal proclamation of October 29th, and bears evidence of being written while the English still occupied Toulon or early in November, 1793. There are passages in it that suggest the hand of Paine, along with others which he could not have written. It is possible that some composition of his, in pursuance of the task assigned him and Condorcet, was utilized by the Committee of Public Safety in its answer to George III.
“Englishmen in the French Revolution.” By John G. Alger. London, 1889, p.176. (A book of many blunders.)
It would appear that Paine had not been informed until Marat declared it, and was confirmed by the testimony of Choppin, that the attempted suicide was on his account.
Moniteur, April 24, 1793.
“La Revolution,’` ii., pp.382, 413, 414.
“Danton Emigre,” p.177.
“Early History of Charles James Fox,” American ed., p.440.
The following document was found among the papers of Mr. John Hall, originally of Leicester, England, and has been forwarded to me by hit descendant, J. Dutton Steele, Jr., of Philadelphia. “A Copy of a Letter from the chairman of a meeting of the Gentry and Clergy at Atherstone, written in consequence of an envious schoolmaster and two or three others who informed the meeting that the Excise Officers of Polesworth were employed in distributing the Rights of Man; but which was very false.
“SIR:
“I should think it unnecessary to inform you, that the purport of his Majesty’s proclamation in the Month of May last, and the numerous meetings which are daily taking place both in Town and Country, are for the avowed; purpose of suppressing treasonable and seditious writings amongst which (p.63) Mr. Payne’s Rights of Man ranks most conspicuous. Were I not informed you have taken some pains in spreading that publication, I write to say, ‘If you don’t from this time adopt a different kind of conduct you will be taken notice of in such way as may prove very disagreeable.’”The Eyes of the Country are upon you and you will do well in future to shew yourself faithful to the Master who employs you.
“I remain, Your Hble. servant,
"(Signed) Jos. Boultbee.“Baxterby, 15th Decr., ’92.
“N. B. The letter was written the next morning after the Meeting where most of the Loyal souls got drunk to an uncommon degree. They drank his Majesty’s health so often the reckoning amounted to 7s. 6d. each. One of the informers threw down a shilling and ran away.”
Rickman, p.129.
“Rickman appears to have escaped from England in 1792, according to the following sonnet sent me by Dr. Grece. It is headed:”Sonnet to my Little Girl, 1792. Written at Calais, on being pursued by cruel prosecution and persecution.”
“Farewell, sweet babe! and mayst thou never know, Like me, the pressure of exceeding woe. Some griefs (for they are human nature’s right) On life’s eventful stage will be thy lot; Some generous cares to clear thy mental sight, Some pains, in happiest hours, perhaps, begot; But mayst thou ne’er be, like thy father, driven From a loved partner, family, and home, Snatched from each heart-felt bliss, domestic heaven! From native shores, and all that’s valued, roam. Oh, may bad governments, the source of human woe, Ere thou becom’st mature, receive their deadly blow; Then mankind’s greatest curse thou ne’er wilt know.”
Etats Unis. vol. 37. Document 39.
“Demander que Thomas Payne soit decrete d’accusation pour les interets de l’Amerique autant que de la France.”
I will now call attention to a passage in “The Journal of a Spy in Paris During the Reign of Terror,” recently (p.xiii) published, and will place it beside an extract from Paine’s memorial to Monroe while in prison.
“April 2, 1793. He [Paine] is said to be moving heaven and earth to get himself recognized as an American Citizen, and thereon liberated . . . The Minister of the American States [Gouverneur Morris] is too shrewd to allow such a fish to go over and swim in his waters, if he can prevent it; and avows to Robespierre that he knows nothing of any rights of naturalization claimed by Paine.”
Here then is corroboration, were it needed, of the criminal treachery of Morris to both Paine and Washington, of which I have given unanswerable documentary evidence (vol. iii., chap. 21), although I had not then conceived that Morris’ guilt extended to personal incitements of Robespierre against Paine.
Morris knew well that “naturalization,” though an effective word to use on Robespierre, had nothing to do with the citizenship acquired at the American Revolution by persons of alien birth, such as Paine, Hamilton, Robert Morris, – to name three who had held high offices in the United States. But, as Monroe stated, all Americans of 1776 were born under the British flag, and needed no formal process to make them citizens. – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xii-xiii.
On September 1, 1792, Morris answered a request of the executive of the republic that he could not comply until he had received “orders from his Court,” (les ordres de ma cour). The representatives of the new-born republic were scandalized by such an expression from an American Minister, and also by his intimacy with Lord and Lady Gower. They may have suspected what Morris’ “Diary” now suggests, that he (Morris) owed his appointment to this English Ambassador and his wife. On August 17, 1792, Lord Gower was recalled, in hostility to the republic, but during the further weeks of his stay in Paris the American Minister frequented their house. From the recall Morris was saved for a year by the intervention of Edmund Randolph. (See my “Omitted Chapters of History,” etc., p.149.) Randolph met with a Morrisian reward. Morris (“Diary”’ ii., p.98) records an accusation of Randolph, to which he listened in the office of Lord Grenville, Secretary of State, which plainly meant his (Randolph’s) ruin, which followed. He knew it to be untrue, but no defence is mentioned.
State Archives, Paris. Etats Unis, vol. 38, no. 93. Endorsed: “No. 6. Translation of a letter from Thomas Payne to Citizen Barrere.” It may be noted that Paine and Barrere, though they could read each other’s language, could converse only in their own tongue.
Morris’ letter to Washington, Oct. 18, 1793. The passage is omitted from the letter as quoted in his “Diary and Letters,” ii., p.53.
See my “Life of Edmund Randolph,” p.214.
“Le Departement des Affaires Etrangeres pendant la Revolution,” p.295.
Letter to Washington, Oct. 18, 1793.
The last of my gleanings were gathered at Bromley, in Kent, where Paine went on April 21, 1792, “to compose,” says his friend Hall, “the funeral sermon of Burke,” but local tradition says, to write the Age of Reason. Paine, as a private letter proves, was anxious for a prosecution of his Rights of Man, which Burke had publicly proposed, and no doubt began at Bromley his pamphlet with the exposure of Burke’s pension. However, when Paine sought refuge from the swarm of radicals and interviewers besetting him in his London lodgings, it is highly probable that he wished to continue his meditations on religious subjects and add to his manuscripts, begun many years before, ultimately pieced together in the Age of Reason. Under the guidance of Mr. Coles Childs, present owner of Bromley Palace, I visited Mr. How, an intelligent watchmaker, who remembers when a boy of twelve hearing his father say that Paine occupied “Church Cottage,” and there wrote the Age of Reason. There is also a local tradition that Paine used to write on the same work while seated under the “Tom Paine Tree,” which is on the palace estate. “Church Cottage” was ecclesiastical property, may even have been the Vicarage, and Paine would pass by the beautiful palace of the Bishops of Rochester to his favorite tree. The legend which has singled out the heretical work of Paine as that which was written in an ecclesiastical mansion, and in an episcopal park, is too picturesque for severe criticism. The “Tom Paine Tree” (p.xx) is a very ancient oak, solitary in its field, and very noble. Mr. Childs pointed out to me some powerful but much rusted wires, amid the upper branches, showing that it had been taken care of. The interior surface of the trunk, which is entirely hollow, is completely charred. The girth at the ground must be twenty-five feet. Not a limb is dead: from the hollow and charred trunk a superb mass of foliage arises. I think Paine must have remembered it when writing patriotic songs for America in the Revolution,
- “The Liberty Tree,” and the “Boston Patriot’s Song,” with its lines –
“Our mountains are crowned with imperial oak, Whose roots like our Liberty ages have nourished.”
From this high and clear spot one may almost see the homestead of Darwin who, more heretical than Paine, has Westminster Abbey for his monument; and whose neighbor, the Rev. Robert Ainslie, of Tromer Lodge, kept in his house the skull and right hand of Thomas Paine! Of the remains of Paine, exhumed by Cobbett in America, the brain came into the possession of Rev. George Reynolds, the skull into that of Rev. Robert Ainslie, both orthodox at the time, both subsequently unorthodox, possibly through some desire to know what thoughts had played through the lamp whose fragments had come into their hands. The daughter of Mr. Ainslie, the first wife of the late Sir Russell Reynolds, wrote me that she remembered the relics, but could not find them after her father’s death; if ever discovered they might well be given quiet burial or cremation at the foot of this “Tom Paine Tree.” However that may be, it is a Talking Oak, if one listens closely, and tells true fables of the charred and scarred and storm-beaten man, rooted deep in the conscience and soul of England, whose career, after its special issues are gone, is still crowned with living foliage. That none can doubt who witnessed the large Paine Exhibition in South Place Chapel, in December, 1895, or that in the Bradlaugh Club, January 29, 1896, and observes the steady demand for his works in England (p.xix) and America. Yet it is certain that comparatively few of those who cherish relics of Paine, and read his books, agree with his religious opinions, or regard his political theories as now practicable. Paine’s immortality among the people is derived mainly from the life and spirit which were in him, consuming all mean partitions between man and man, all arbitrary and unreal distinctions, rising above the cheap jingoism that calls itself patriotism, and affirming the nobler State whose unit is the man, whose motto is “My country is the world, to do good my religion.” – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xix-xxi.
I am indebted for this letter to Dr. John S. H. Fogg, of Boston. The letter is endorsed by Jefferson, “Recd Mar. 3.” [1794].
It was a resumed task. Early in the year Paine had brought to his colleague Lanthenas a manuscript on religion, probably entitled “The Age of Reason.” Lanthenas translated it, and had it printed in French, though no trace of its circulation appears. At that time Lanthenas may have apprehended the proscription which fell on him, with the other Girondins, in May, and took the precaution to show Paine’s essay to Couthon, who, with Robespierre, had religious matters particularly in charge. Couthon frowned on the work and on Paine, and reproached Lanthenas for translating it. There was no frown more formidable than that of Couthon, and the essay (printed only in French) seems to have been suppressed. At the close of the year Paine wrote the whole work de novo. The first edition in English, now before me, was printed in Paris, by Barrois, 1794. In his preface to Part II., Paine implies a previous draft in saying: “I had not finished it more than six hours, in the state it has since appeared, before a guard came,” etc. (The italics are mine.) The fact of the early translation appears in a letter of Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville.
Letter to Samuel Adams. The execution of the Girondins took place on October 31st.
It will be remembered that Audibert had carried to London Paine’s invitation to the Convention.
The preceding documents connected with the arrest are in the Archives Nationales, F. 4641.
“Hist. Parl.,” xxx., p. 924.
“Etats Unis,” vol. xl., Doc. 54. Endorsed: “Received the 28th of same [Pluviose, i.e., Feb. 16th]. To declare reception and to tell him that the Minister will take the necessary steps.” The French Minister’s reply is Doc. 61 of the same volume.
Deforgues’ phrase “laws of the Republic” is also a deception. The Constitution had been totally suspended by the Convention; no government or law had been or ever was established under or by it. There was as yet no Republic, and only revolutionary or martial laws.
“Memoires sur les prisons,” t. ii., p.153.
The next extract that I give is a clipping from a London paper of 1794, the name not given, preserved in a scrap-book extending from 1776 to 1827, which I purchased many years ago at the Bentley sale.
“GENERAL O’HARA AND MR. THOMAS PAYNE
“These well known Gentlemen are at Paris – both kept at the Luxembourg – imprisoned, indeed, but in a mitigated manner as to accommodations, apartments, table, intercourse, and the liberty of the garden – which our well-informed readers know is very large. The ground plan of the Luxembourg is above six acres. In this confinement General O’Hara and Mr. Thomas Payne have often met, and their meeting has been productive of a little event in some sort so unexpected as to be added to the extraordinary vicissitudes of which the present time is so teeming. The fact was that General O’Hara wanted money; and that through Mr. Thomas Payne he was able to get what he wanted. The sum was 200 pounds sterling. The General’s bill, through other channels tried in vain, was negotiated by Mr. Thomas Payn.
The story of this money, and how Paine contrived to keep it, is told in (Letters to the Citizens of the United States, Letter III, ) vol. iii., p.396 note. The mitigations of punishment alluded to in the paragraph did not last long; the last months of Paine’s imprisonment were terrible. O’Hara, captured at Toulon and not released until August, 1795, was the General who carried out the sword of Cornwallis for surrender at Yorktown. – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xvi.
Among the anecdotes told of O’Hara in prison, one is related of an argument he held with a Frenchman, on the relative degrees of liberty in England and France. “In England,” he said’ “we are perfectly free to write and print, George is a good King; but you – why you are not even permitted to write, Robespierre is a tiger!”
Mr. J. G. Alger, author of “Englishmen in the French Revolution,” and “Glimpses of the French Revolution,” (p.xiv) whose continued researches in Paris promise other original and striking works, has graciously sent me a document of much interest just discovered by him in the National Archives, where it is marked U 1021. It is the copy of a “Declaration” made by Paine, the original being buried away in the chaos of Fouquier-Tinville documents. The Declaration was made on October 8, 1794, in connection with the trial of Denis Julien, accused of having been a Spy of Robespierre and his party in the Luxembourg prison. It was proved that on June 29, 1794, Julien had been called on in the prison, where he was detained, to inform the revolutionary tribunal concerning the suspected conspiracy among the prisoners. He said that he knew nothing; that his room was at the extremity of the building divided off from the mass of prisoners, and he could not pronounce against any one. (Wallon’s “Hist. Tribunal Revolutionnaire,” iv., p.409.) Wallon, however, had not discovered this document found by Mr. Alger, which shows that Paine was long a room-mate of Julien in the prison where his (Paine’s) Declaration was demanded and given as follows:
“Denis Julien was my room mate from the time of his entering the Luxembourg prison at the end of the month of Ventose [about the middle of March] till towards the end of Messidor [about the middle of July], at which date I was visited with a violent fever which obliged me to go into a room better suited to the condition I was in. It is for the time when we were room mates that I shall speak of him, as being within my personal knowledge. I shall not go beyond that date, because my illness rendered me incapable of knowing anything of what happened in the prison or elsewhere, and my companions on their part, all the time that my recovery remained doubtful, were silent to me on all that happened. The first news which they told me was of the fall of Robespierre. I state all this so that the real reason why I do not speak of any of the allegations preferred against Julien in the summoning of him as a witness before the revolutionary tribunal, in the case of persons accused of conspiracy, may be clearly known, and that my silence on that case may not be attributed to any unfavorable reticence. Of his conduct during the time of (p.xv) our room intimacy, which lasted more than four months, I can speak fully. He appeared to me during all that time a man of strict honor, probity, and humanity, incapable of doing anything repugnant to those principles. We found ourselves in entire agreement in the horror which we felt for the character of Robespierre, and in the opinion which we formed of his hypocrisy, particularly on the occasion of his harangue on the Supreme Being, and on the atrocious perfidy which he showed in proposing the bloody law of the 22 Prairial [June 10, 1794]; and we communicated our opinions to each other in writing, and these confidential notes we wrote in English to prevent the risk of our being understood by the prisoners, and for our own safety we threw them into the fire as soon as read. As I knew nothing of the denunciations which took place at the Luxembourg, or of the judgments and executions which were the consequence, until at least a month after the event, I can only say that when I was informed of them, as also of the appearance of Julien as a witness in that affair, I concluded from the opinion which I had already formed of him that he had been an unwilling witness, or that he had acted with the view of rendering service to the accused, and I have now no reason to believe otherwise. That the accused were not guilty of any anti-revolutionary conduct is also what I believe, but the fact was that all the prisoners saw themselves shut up like sheep in a pen to be sacrificed in turn just as they daily saw their companions were, and the expression of discontent which the misery of such a situation forced from them was converted into a conspiracy by the spies of Robespierre who were posted in the prison. – Luxembourg, 17 Vendemiaire, Year 3.”
Julien was discharged without trial. The answers he had given to the Revolutionary Committee, quoted above, unknown of course to Paine, justified his opinion of Julien, though the fact of his being summoned at all looks as if Julien had been placed with Paine as an informer. In the companionship of the author Julien may have found a change of heart! Mr. Alger in a note to me remarks, “What a picture of the prisoners’ distrust of each other!” The document also brings before us the notable fact that, though at its date, fourteen weeks after the fall of Robespierre, the sinister power of Gouverneur Morris’ accomplices (p.xvi) on the Committee of Public Safety still kept Paine in prison, his testimony to the integrity of an accused man was called for and apparently trusted. – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xiii-xvi.
“Memoires de B. Barrere,” t. i., p.80. Lewis Goldsmith was the author of “Crimes of the Cabinets.”
It must be remembered that at this time it seemed the strongest recommendation of any one to public favor to describe him as a victim of Robespierre; and Paine’s friends could conceive no other cause for the detention of a man they knew to be innocent.
“View of the Conduct of the Executive in the Foreign Affairs of the United States,” by James Monroe, p.7.
“Le Departement des Affaires Etrangeres,” etc., p.345.
The whole is published in French: “Memoire de Thomas Payne, autographe et signe de sa main: addresse `a M. Monroe, ministre des Etats-unis en France, pour reclamer sa mise en liberte comme Citoyen Americain, 10 Septembre, 1794. Villeneuve.”
Morris’ royal proclamations are printed in full in his biography by Jared Sparks.
“The last dying words of Thomas Paine. Executed at the Guillotine in France on the 1st of September, 1799.” The dying speech begins: “Ye numerous spectators gathered around, pray give ear to my last words; I am determined to speak the Truth in these my last moments, altho’ I have written and spoke nothing but lies all my life.” There is nothing in the witless leaflet worth quoting. When Paine was burnt in effigy, in 1792, it appears to have been with accompaniments of the same kind. Before me is a small placard, which reads thus: “The Dying Speech and Confession of the Arch-Traitor Thomas Paine. Who was executed at Oakham on (p.153) Thursday the 27th of December 1792. This morning the Officers usually attending on such occasions went in procession on Horseback to the County Gaol, and demanded the Body of the Arch-Traitor, and from thence proceeded with the Criminal drawn in a Cart by an Ass to the usual place of execution with his Pamphlet called the ‘Rights of Man’ in his right hand.”
Here Thibaudeau was inexact. In the next sentence but one he rightly describes Paine as a foreigner. The allusion to “an intrigue” is significant.
State Archives of France. Etats Unis, vol. xliii. Monroe dates his letter, “19th year of the American Republic.”
“The conduct of Spain towards us is unaccountable and injurious. Mr. Pinckney is by this time gone over to Madrid as our envoy extraordinary to bring matters to a conclusion some way or other. But you will seize any favorable moment to execute what has been entrusted to you respecting the Mississippi.” – Letter of Randolph to Monroe, February 15, 1795.
Two important historical works have recently appeared relating to the famous Senator Brown. The first is a publication of the Filson Club: “The Political Beginnings of Kentucky,” by John Mason Brown. The second is: “The Spanish Conspiracy,”by Thomas Marshall Green (Cincinnati, Robert Clarke & Co., 1891). The intercepted letter quoted above has some bearing on the controversy between these authors. Apparently, Senator Brown, like many other good patriots, favored independent action in Kentucky when that seemed for the welfare of the United States, but, when the situation had changed, Brown is found co-operating with Washington and Randolph.
“Mr. Thomas Paine is one of those men who have contributed the most to establish the liberty of America. His ardent love of humanity, and his hatred of every sort of tyranny, have induced him to take up in England the defence of the French revolution, against the amphigorical declamation of Mr. Burke. His work has been translated into our language, and is universally known. What French patriot is there who has not already, from the bottom of his heart, thanked this foreigner for having strengthened our cause by all the powers of his reason and reputation? It is with pleasure that I observe an opportunity of offering him the tribute of my gratitude and my esteem for the truly philosophical application of talents so distinguished as his own.” – Sieyes in theMoniteur, July 6, 1791.
I am indebted to Mrs. Gouverneur, of Washington, for this letter, which is among the invaluable papers of her ancestor, President Monroe, which surely should be secured for our national archives.
“Porcupine’s Political Censor, for December, 1796. A Letter to the Infamous Tom. Paine, in answer to his letter to General Washington.”
In a marginal note on Monroe’s “View, etc.,” found among his papers, Washington writes: “Did then the situation of our affairs admit of any other alternative than negotiation or war?” (Sparks’ “Washington,” xi., p.505). Since writing my “Life of Randolph,” in which the history of the British treaty is followed, I found in the French Archives (Etats-Unis. vol. ii., doc. 12) Minister Fauchet’s report of a conversation with Secretary Randolph in which he (Randolph) said: “What would you have us do? We could not end our difficulties with the English but by a war or a friendly treaty. We were not prepared for war; it was necessary to negotiate.” It is now tolerably certain that there was “bluff” on the part of the British players, in London and Philadelphia, but it won.
“When a party was forming, in the latter end of seventy-seven and beginning of seventy-eight, of which John Adams was one, to remove Mr. Washington from the command of the army, on the complaint that he did nothing, I wrote the fifth number of the Crisis, and published it at Lancaster (Congress then being at Yorktown, in Pennsylvania), to ward off that meditated blow; for though I well knew that the black times of seventy-six were the natural consequence of his want of military judgment in the choice of positions into which the army was put about New York and New Jersey, I could see no possible advantage, and nothing but mischief, that could arise by distracting the army into parties, which would have been the case had the intended motion gone on.”
– Paine’s Letter iii, To the People of the United States (1802).
- “In writing upon thin, as, upon every other subject, I speak a language plain and intelligible. I deal not in hints and intimations. I have several reasons for this: first, that I may be clearly understood; secondly, that it may be seen I am in earnest; and thirdly, because it is an affront to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance.”
– Paine’s reply to Bishop Watson.
“An Apology for the Bible . By R. Llandaff” [Dr. Richard Watson].
Felix Rocquain’s fine work, “L’Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution;” [“The Revolutionary Spirit Before the Revolution”] though not speculative, illustrates the practical nature of revolution, – an uncivilized and often retrograde form of evolution.
“History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.”
The sentence imported into Paine’s Part First is: “The book of Luke was carried by one voice only,” I find the words added as a footnote in the Philadelphia edition, 1794, p.33. While Paine in Paris was utilizing the ascent of the footnote to his text, Dr. Priestley in Pennsylvania was using it to show Paine’s untrustworthiness. (“Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever,” p.73.). But it would appear, though neither discovered it, that Paine’s critic was the real offender. In quoting the page, before answering it, Priestley incorporated in the text the footnote of an American editor. Priestley could not of course imagine each editorial folly, but all the same the reader may here see the myth-insect already building the Paine Mythology.
In 1778 Lessing set forth his “New Hypothesis of the Evangelists,” that they had independently built on a basis derived from some earlier Gospel of the Hebrews, – a theory now confirmed by the recovered fragments of that lost Memoir, collected by Dr, Nicholson of the Bodleian Library. It is tolerably certain that Paine was unacquainted with Lessing’s work, when he became convinced by variations in the accounts of the resurrection, that some earlier narrative “became afterwards the foundation of the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” – these being, traditionally, eye-witnesses.
“Old John Berry, the late Col. Hay’s servant, told me he knew Paine very well when he was at Dover – had heard him preach there – thought him a staymaker by trade.” – W. Weedon, of Glynde, quoted in Notes and Queries (London), December 29, 1866
Mr. Thaddeus B. Wakeman, an eminent representative of the “Religion of Humanity,” writes me that he has not found this phrase in any work earlier than Paine’s “Crisis, vii.”
On August 10, 1793, there was a sort of communion of the Convention around the statue of Nature, whose breasts were fountains of water, Herault de Sechelles, at that time president, addressed the statue:
“Sovereign of the savage and of the enlightened nations, O Nature, this great people, gathered at the first beam of day before thee, is free! It is in thy bosom, it is in thy sacred sources, that it has recovered its rights, That it has regenerated itself after traversing so many ages of error and servitude: It must return to the simplicity of thy ways to rediscover liberty and equality. O Nature! receive the expression of the eternal attachment of the French people for thy laws; And may the teeming waters gushing from thy breasts, may this pure beverage Which refreshed the first human beings, consecrate is this Cup of Fraternity and Equality The vows that France makes thee this day, – the most beautiful, That the sun has illumined since it was suspended in the immensity of space.”
The cup passed around from lip to lip, amid fervent ejaculations. Next. year Nature’s breasts issued Herault’s blood.
The letter of Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville, of which the original, French is before me, is quoted is an article in Scriber, September, 1880, by. Hon. B. B. Washburne (former Minister to France); it is reprinted in Remsburg’s compilation of testimonies:“Thomas Paine, the Apostle of Religious and Political Liberty” (1880). See also p.135 of this volume.
“A Lecture, on the Existence and Attributes of the Deity; as Deduced from a Contemplation of His Works, MDCCXCV.” The copy in my possession is inscribed with pen: “This was J. Joyce’s copy, and noticed by him as Paine’s work.” Mr. Joyce was a Unitarian minister. It is probable that the suppression of Paine’s name wee in deference to his outlawry, and to the dread, by a sect whose legal position was precarious of any suspicion of connection with “Painite” principles.
Astronomy, as we know, he had studied profoundly. In early, life he had studied astronomic globes, purchased at the cost of many a dinner, and the orrery, and attended lectures at the Royal Society. In the “Age of Reason” he writes, twenty-one years before Herschel’s famous paper on the Nebulae: “The probability is that each of those fixed stars is also a sun, round which another system of worlds or planets, though too remote for us to discover, performs its revolutions.”
Paine’s friend and fellow-prisoner, Anacharsis Clootz, was the first to describe Humanity as “L’Etre Supreme” [“To Be Supreme” – Digital Editor’s Translation].
“Life of George Ticknor,” ii., p.113.
Mr. Spofford, Librarian of Congress, has kindly copied this letter for me from the original, among the papers of George Bancroft.
“The office of ‘castigation’ was unworthy of our friend’s talents, and detrimental to his purpose of persuading others. Such a contemptuous treatment, even of an unfair disputant, was also too well calculated to depreciate in the public estimation that benevolence of character by which Mr. Wakefield was so justly distinguished.” – “Life of Gilbert Wakefield,” 1804, ii., p.97.
These were the actual prices of the books.
“But I would not forcibly suppress this book (”Age of Reason” ); much less would I punish (O my God, be such wickedness far from me, or leave me destitute of thy favour in the midst of this perjured and sanguinary generation!) much less would I punish, by fine or imprisonment, from any possible consideration, the publisher or author of these pages.” – Letter of Gilbert Wakefield to Sir John Scott, Attorney General, 1798. For evidence of Unitarian intolerance see the discourse of W. J. Fox on”The Duties of Christians towards Deists” (Collected Works, vol. i.). In this discourse, October 24, 1819, on the prosecution of Carlile for publishing the “Age of Reason,” Mr. Fox expresses his regret that the first prosecution should have been conducted by a Unitarian. “Goaded,” he says, “by the calumny which would identify them with those who yet reject the Saviour, they have, in repelling so unjust an accusation, caught too much of the tone of their opponents, and given the most undesirable proof of their affinity to other Chris by that unfairness towards the disbeliever which does not become any Christian.” Ultimately Mr. Fox became the champion of all the principles of “The Age of Reason” and “The Rights of Man.”
Sir Robert Smith (Smythe in the Peerage List) was born in 1744, and married, first, Miss Blake of London (1776). The name of the second Lady Smith, Paines friend, before her marriage I have not ascertained.
“Observations on Mr. Paine’s Pamphlet,” etc. Broome escapes the charge of prejudice by speaking of “Mr. Paine, whose abilities I admire and deprecate in a breath.” Paine’s pamphlet was also replied to by George Chalmers (“Oldys”) who had written the slanderous biography.
Richard Carlile’s sketch of Paine, p.20. This large generosity to English sufferers appears the more characteristic beside the closing paragraph of (p.238) Paine’s pamphlet, “As an individual citizen of America, and as far as an individual can go, I have revenged (if I may use the expression without any immoral meaning) the piratical depredations committed on American commerce by the English government. I have retaliated for France on the subject of finance: and I conclude with retorting on Mr. Pitt the expression he used against France, and say, that the English system of finance, ‘is on the verge, nay even in the gulf of bankruptcy.’”
Concerning the false French assignats forged in England, see Louis Blanc’s “History of the Revolution,” vol. xii., p.101.
Soon after Jefferson became President Paine wrote to him, suggesting that Sir Robert’s firm might be safely depended on as the medium of American financial transactions in Europe.
Carey’s edition, Philadelphia; 1996.
Patrick Henry’s Answer to the “Age of Reason” shared the like fate. “When, during the first two years of his retirement, Thomas Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’ made its appearance, the old statesman was moved to write out a somewhat elaborate treatise in defence of the truth of Christianity. This treatise it was his purpose to have published. ‘He read the manuscript to his family as he progressed with it, and completed it a short time before his death’ [1799]. When it was finished, however, ‘being diffident about his own work,’ and impressed also by the great ability of the replies to Paine which were then appearing in England, ‘he directed his wife to destroy’ what he had written. She complied literally with his directions, and thus put beyond the chance of publication a work which seemed, to some who heard it, ‘the most eloquent and unanswerable argument in defence of the Bible which was ever written.’” – Fontaine MS. quoted in Tyler’s “Patrick Henry.”
“Thomas Payne
a la Legislature et an Directoire: ou la justice Agraire opposeea la Loi et aax Privileges Agraires.” [“Thomas Payne to the Legislature and the Directoriate: or the Agrarian Justice opposed to the Law and on Agrarian Privileges.” – Digital Editor’s Translation.]This loss, mentioned by Paine in a private note, occurred about the time when he had devoted the proceeds of his pamphlet on English Finance, a very large sum, to prisoners held for debt in Newgate. I suppose the thousand pounds were the proceeds of the “Age of Reason.”
"Subscriptions (says his circular) will be received by J.Ashley, Shoemaker, No.6 High Holborn; C. Cooper, Grocer, New Compton-st., Soho; G. Wilkinson, Printer, No.115 Shoreditch; J. Rhynd, Printer, Ray-st., Clerkenwell; R. Hodgson, Hatter, No.29 Brook-st., Holborn.” It will be observed that the defence of free printing had fallen to humble people.
"The King v. Thomas Williams for Blasphemy. -- Take noticethat the Prosecutors of the Indictment against the above named Defendant will upon the Trial of this cause be required to produce a certain Book described in the said Indictment to be the Holy Bible. – John Martin. Solicitor for the Defendant. Dated the 17th day of June 1797.”
"I have preserved," says Royall Tyler, "an epigram of PeterPindaes, written originally in a blank leaf of a copy of Paine’s ‘Age of Reason,’ and not inserted in any of his works.
” `Tommy Paine wrote this book to prove that the bible Was an old woman’s dream of fancies most idle; That Solomon’s proverbs were made by low livers, That prophets were fellows who sang semiquavers; That religion and miracles all were a jest, And the devil in torment a tale of the priest. Though Beelzebub’s absence from hell I’ll maintain, Yet we all must allow that the Devil’s in Paine.’ ”
This sudden recall involved Monroe in heavy expenses, whichCongress afterwards repaid I am indebted to Mr. Frederick McGuire, of Washington, for the manuscript of Monroe’s statement of his expenses and annoyances caused by his recall, – which he declares due to “the representations which were made to him (Washington] by those in whom he confided.” He states that Paine remained in his house a year and a half, and that he advanced him 250 louis d’or. For these services to Paine, he adds, “no claims were ever presented on my part, nor is any indemnity now desired.” This money was repaid ($1,188) to Monroe by an Act of Congress, April 7, 1831. The advances are stated in the Act to have been made “from time to time,” and were no doubt regarded by both Paine and Monroe as compensated by the many services rendered by the author to the Legation.
In a letter to Duane, many years later, Paine relates thefollowing story concerning the British Union: “when Lord Malmsbury arrived in Paris, in the time of the Directory Government, to open a negociation for a peace, his credentials ran in the old style of ‘George, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, king.’ Malmsbury was informed that although the assumed title of king of France, in his credentials, would not prevent France opening a negociation, yet that no treaty of peace could be concluded until that assumed title was removed. Pitt then hit on the Union. Bill, under which the assumed title of king of France was discontinued.”
Rickman, p. 164.Charles Nodier, in his "Souvenirs de la Revolution et del’Empire” (Paris, 1850), has some striking sketches of Paine and his friends in the last years of the eighteenth century. Nodier had no sympathy with Paine’s opinions, but was much impressed by the man. I piece together some extracts from various parts of his rambling work.
“One of our dinners at Bonneville’s has left such an impression on me that when I am thinking of these things it seems like a dream. There were six of us in the Poet’s immense sitting room. (p.xvii) It had four windows looking on the street. The cloth was spread on an oblong table, loaded at each end with bronzes, globes, maps, books, crests, and portraits. The only one of the guests whom I knew was the impenetrable Seyffert, with his repertory of ideas a thousand times more profound, but also a thousand times more obscure than the cave of Trophonius. Old Mercier came in and sat down with his chin resting on his big ivory-topped cane. . . . The fifth guest was a military man, fifty years of age, with a sort of inverted curled up face, reserved in conversation, like a man of sense, common in manners, like a man of the people. They called him a Pole. The last guest was an Anglo-American, with a long, thin, straight head, all in profile as it were, without any expression; for gentleness, benevolence, shyness, give little scope for it. . . . This Anglo-American was Thomas Payne, and the Tartar with sullen looks was Kosciusko . . . . Thomas Payne, whom I seldom saw, has left on me the impression of a well-to-do man, bold in principle, cautious in practice; liable to yield himself up to revolutionary movements, incapable of accepting the dangerous consequences; good by nature, and a sophist by conviction. . . . On the whole an honest and unpretending person who, in the most fatal day of our annals, exhibited every courage and virtue; and of whom history, in order to be just to his memory, ought to forget nothing but his writings.”
– Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xvi-xvii.
Sir Richard Phillips says: "In 1778 Thomas Paine proposed, inAmerica, this application of steam.” (“Million of Facts,” p.776.) As Sir Richard assisted Fulton in his experiments on the Thames, he probably heard from him the fact about Paine, though, indeed, in the controversy between Rumsey and Fitch, Paine’s priority to both was conceded. In America, however, the priority really belonged to the eminent mechanician William Henry, of Lancaster, Pa. When Fitch visited Henry, in 1785, he was told by him that he was not the first to devise steam navigation; that (p.281) he himself had thought of it in 1776, and mentioned it to Andrew Ellicott; and that Thomas Paine, while a guest at his house in 1778, had spoken to him on the subject. I am indebted to Mr. John W. Jordan, of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, for notes from the papers of Henry, his ancestor, showing that Paine’s scheme was formed without knowledge of others, and that it contemplated a turbine application of steam to a wheel. Both he and Henry, as they had not published their plans, agreed to leave Fitch the whole credit. Fitch publicly expressed his gratitude to Paine. Thurston adds that Paine, in 1788, proposed that Congress should adopt the whole matter for the national benefit. (“History of the Growth of the Steam Engine,” pp.252, 253.)
Oliver Ellsworth, William V. Murray, and William R. Davie,were sent by President Adams to France to negotiate a treaty. There is little doubt that the famous letter of Joel Barlow to Washington, October 2, 1798, written in the interest of peace, was composed after consultation with Paine. Adams, on reading the letter, abused Barlow. “Tom Paine,” he said, “is not a more worthless fellow.” But he obeyed the letter. The Commissioners he sent were associated with the anti-French and British party in America, but peace with America was of too much importance to the new despot of France for the opportunity to be missed of forming a Treaty.
"Thomas Poole and His Friends," ii, p.85."THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR TO THOMAS PAINE:"I have received, Citizen, the observations that you havebeen so good as to address to me upon the construction of iron bridges. They will be of the greatest utility to us when the new kind of. construction goes to be executed for the first time. With pleasure I assure you, Citizen, that you have rights of more than one kind to the gratitude of nations, and I give you, cordially, the expression of my particular esteem.
“CHAPTAL.”
It is rather droll, considering the appropriation of his patent in England, and the confiscation of a thousand pounds belonging to him, to find Paine casually mentioning that at this time a person came from London with plans and drawings to consult with him about an iron arch of 600 feet, over the Thames, then under consideration by a committee of the House of commons.
"Beau Dawson," an eminent Virginia Congressman.It was cleared up afterwards. Jefferson had been charged withsending a national ship to France for the sole purpose of bringing Paine home, and Paine himself would have been the first to condemn such an assumption of power. Although the President’s adherents thought it right to deny this, Jefferson wrote to Paine that he had nothing to do with the paragraph. “With respect to the letter [offering the ship] I never hesitate to avow and justify it in conversation. In no other way do I trouble myself to contradict anything which is said. At that time, however, there were anomalies in the motion’s of some of our friends which events have at length reduced to regularity.”
J. M. Lequinio, author of "Prejudices Destroyed," and otherrationalistic works, especially dealt within Priestley’s “Letters to the Philosophers of France.”
No doubt Clio Rickman.At a somewhat later period Paine was met in Paris by theeminent engraver, Abraham Raimbach, Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, whose “Recollections,” privately printed, were loaned me by Mr. Henry Clifton. I am permitted by Mr. W.L. Raimbach, grandson of the engraver, to use this family volume. Raimbach probably had met Paine between 1800 and 1802, and writes:
“He was at this time constantly to be seen at an obscure cabar in an obscure street in the fauxbourg St. Germain (Cafe Jacob, rue Jacob). The scene as we entered the room from the street – it was on the ground floor – was, under the circumstances, somewhat impressive. It was on a summer’s evening, and several tables were occupied by men, apparently tradesmen and mechanics, some playing at the then universal game of dominoes, others drinking their bottle of light, frothy, but pleasant beer, or their (p.xviii) little glass of liqueur, while in a retired part of the room sat the once-dreaded demagogue, the supposed conspirator against thrones and altars, the renowned Thomas Paine! He was in conversation with several well-dressed Irishmen, who soon afterwards took leave, and we placed ourselves at his table. His general appearance was mean and poverty-stricken. The portrait of him engraved by Sharp from Romney’s portrait is a good likeness, but he was now much withered and careworn, tho’ his dark eye still retained its sparkling vigor. He was fluent in his speech, of mild and gentle demeanor, clear and distinct in enunciation, and his voice exceedingly soft and agreeable. The subject of his talk being of course political, resembled very much his printed opinions; and the dogmatic form in which he delivered them seemed to evince his own perfect self-conviction of their truth.
– Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xvii-xviii.
"Letters from France," etc., London, 1804, 2 vols., 8vo.Thirty-three pages of the last letter are devoted to Paine.
Abraham Raimbach, Corresponding Member of the Institute ofFrance, whose “Recollections,” mentions having afterwards understood that Colonel Bosville, of Yorkshire, was very kind to him, and enabled Paine to return to America. Lewis Goldsmith says that Sir Francis Burdett and Mr. William Bosville made him a present of 300 louis d’ors, with which he remunerated Bonneville, with whom he had resided nearly six years. Goldsmith’s article on Paine (Anti-Gallican Monitor, February 28, 1813) contains a good many errors, but some shrewd remarks:
“From what I knew of this man, who once made such a noise in this country and America, I judge him to have been harmless and inoffensive; and I firmly believe that if he could have imagined that his writings would have caused bloodshed he would never have written at all. . . . He never was respected by any party in France, as he certainly was not an advocate of (what was falsely called) French liberty, – that system which enforced Republican opinions by drowning, shooting, and the guillotine. . . . He even saw several foreigners, who like himself were staunch admirers of the French Revolution, led to the scaffold – such as Anacharsis Clootz, Baron Trenk, etc. – and had Robespierre lived eight days longer Paine would have certainly followed them, as his name was already on the Proscribed list of the Public Accuser. . . . I have no doubt that if (p.xix) Paine, on his return to America, had found the head of the government of that country [Jefferson] to be that stern Republican which he professed to be, he would have written some account of the French Revolution, and of the horrid neglect which he experienced there from Robespierre as well as from Bonaparte; for if the former designed to take away his life, the latter refused him the means of living. . . . I must in justice to him declare that he left France a decided enemy to the Revolution in that country, and with an unconquerable aversion to Bonaparte, against whom he indulged himself in speaking in severe terms to almost every person of his acquaintance in Paris.”
– Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xviii-xix.
"The Snowdrop and Critic," Pennsylvania Magazine, 1779.Couplets are omitted between those given.
Paine still had faith in Bosville. He was slow in suspectingany man who seemed enthusiastic for liberty. In this connection it may be mentioned that it is painful to find in the “Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris,” (ii., p.426) a confidential letter to Robert R. Livingston, Minister in France, which seems to assume that Minister’s readiness to receive slanders of Jefferson, who appointed him, and of Paine whose friendship he seemed to value. Speaking of the President, Morris says: “The employment of and confidence in adventurers from abroad will sooner or later rouse the pride and indignation of this country.” Morris’ editor adds: “This was probably an allusion to Thomas Paine, who had recently returned to America and was supposed to be an intimate friend of Mr. Jefferson, who, it was said, received him warmly, dined him at the White House, and could be seen walking arm in arm with him on the street any fine afternoon.” The allusion to “adventurers” was no doubt meant for Paine, but not to his reception by Jefferson, for Morris’ letter was written on August 27th, some two months before Paine’s arrival. It was probably meant by Morris to damage Paine in Paris, where it was known that he was intimate with Livingston, who had been introduced by him to influential men, among others to Sir Robert Smith and Este, bankers. It is to be hoped that Livingston resented Morris’ assumption of his treacherous character. Morris, who had shortly before dined at the White House, tells Livingston that Jefferson “is descending to a condition which I find no decent word to designate.” Surely Livingston’s descendants should discover his reply to that letter.
To the Rev. Dr. Waterhouse (Unitarian) who had askedpermission to publish a letter of his, Jefferson, with a keen remembrance of Paine’s fate, wrote (July 19, 1822): “No, my dear Sir, not for the world. Into what a hornet’s nest would it thrust my head! – The genus irritabile vatum, on whom argument is lost, and reason is by themselves disdained in matters of religion. Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily wrongs of the world, but the redressment of mental vagaries would be an enterprise more than Quixotic. I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding as to inculcate reason into that of an Athanasian. I am old, and tranquillity is now my summum bonum. Keep me therefore from the fire and faggot of Calvin and his victim Servetus. Happy in the prospect of a restoration of a primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.” – MS. belonging to Dr. Fogg of Boston.
The National lntelligencer (Nov. 3d), announcing Paine'sarrival at Baltimore, said, among other things: “Be his religious sentiments what they may, it must be their [the American people’s] wish that he may live in the undisturbed possession of our common blessings, and enjoy them the more from his active participation in their attainment.” The same paper said, Nov. 10th: “Thomas Paine has arrived in this city [Washington] and has received a cordial reception from the Whigs of Seventy-six, and the republicans of 1800 who have the independence to feel and avow a sentiment of gratitude for his eminent revolutionary services.”
They were published in the National Intelligencer of November15th, 22d, 29th, December 6th, January 25th, and February 2d, 1803. Of the others one appeared in the Aurora (Philadelphia), dated from Bordentown, N. J., March 12th, and the last in the Trenton True American, dated April 21st.
"The idea occurred to me," Paine afterwards wrote to thePresident, “without knowing it had occurred to any other person, and I mentioned it to Dr. Leib who lived in the same house (Lovell’s); and, as he appeared pleased with it, I wrote the note and showed it to him before I sent it. The next morning you said to me that measures were already taken in that business. When Leib returned from Congress I told him of it. ‘I knew that,’ said he. ‘why then,’ said I, ‘did you not tell me so, because in that case I would not have sent the note.’ ‘That is the very reason,’ said he; ‘I would not tell you, because two opinions concurring on a case strengthen it.’ I do not, however, like Dr. Leib’s motion about Banks. Congress ought to be very cautious how it gives encouragement to this speculating project of banking, for it is now carried to an extreme. It is but another kind of striking paper money. Neither do I like the notion respecting the recession of the territory [District of Columbia.].” Dr. Michael Leib was a representative from Pennsylvania.
"Life of Jefferson," ii., 642 seq. Randall is mistaken insome statements. Paine, as we have seen, did not return on the ship placed at his service by the President; nor did the President’s letter appear until long after his return, when he and Jefferson felt it necessary in order to disabuse the public mind of the most absurd rumors on the subject.
The original is in possession of Mr. William T. Havermeyer,Jr.
It should be stated that Burlington County, in whichBordentown is situated, was preponderantly Federalist, and that Trenton was in the hands of a Federalist mob of young well-to-do rowdies. The editor of the True American, a Republican paper to which Paine had contributed, having commented on a Fourth of July orgie of those rowdies in a house associated with the revolution, was set upon with bludgeons on July 12th, and suffered serious injuries. The Grand jury refused to present the Federalist ruffians, though the evidence was clear, and the mob had free course.
The facts of the Paine mob are these: after dining at Government House, Trenton, Kirkbride applied for a seat on the New York stage for Paine. The owner, Voorhis, cursed Paine as “a deist,” and said, “I’ll be damned if he shall go in my stage.” Another stage-owner also refused, saying, “My stage and horses were once struck by lightning, and I don’t want them to suffer again.” When Paine and Kirkbride had entered their carriage a mob surrounded them with a drum, playing the “rogue’s march.” The local reporter (True American) says, “Mr. Paine discovered not the least emotion of fear or anger, but calmly observed that such conduct had no tendency to hurt his feelings or injure his fame.” The mob then tried to frighten the horse with the drum, and succeeded, but the two gentlemen reached a friend’s house in Brunswick in safety. A letter from Trenton had been written to the stage-master there also, to prevent Paine from securing a seat, whether with success does not appear.
tries to unite republicanism and infidelity by stating that Part I of the “Age of Reason” was sent in MS. to Mr. Fellows of New York, and in the following year Part II was gratuitously distributed “from what is now the office of the Aurora.” On September 24th that paper publishes a poem about Paine, ending:On July 12th the Evening Post (edited by William Coleman)
“And having spent a lengthy life in evil, Return again unto thy parent Devil!”
Another paragraph says that Franklin hired Paine in London to come to America and write in favor of the Revolution, – a remarkable example of federalist heredity from “Toryism.” On September 27th the paper prints a letter purporting to have been found by a waiter in Lovett’s Hotel after Paine’s departure, – a long letter to Paine, by some red-revolutionary friend, of course gloating over the exquisite horrors filling Europe in consequence of the “Rights of Man.” The pretended letter is dated “Jan. 12, 1803,” and signed “J. Oldney.” The paper’s correspondent pretends to have found out Oldney, and conversed with him. No doubt many simple people believed the whole thing genuine.
'Dr. Francis' "Old New York," p.140.
of the (p.332) “Rights of Man” in 1791 (May 6-27), the editor being then John Pintard. At the end of the publication a poetical tribute to Paine was printed. Four of the lines run:The New York Daily Advertiser published the whole of Part I.
“Roused by the reason of his manly page, Once more shall Paine a listening world engage; From reason’s source a bold reform he brings, By raising up mankind be pulls down kings.”
At the great celebration (October 12, 1792) of the third Centenary of the discovery of America, by the sons of St. Tammany, New York, the first man toasted after Columbus was Paine, and next to Paine “The Rights of Man.” They were also extolled in an ode composed for the occasion, and sung.
I am indebted for this letter to the N. Y. Hist. Society,which owns the original.
Paine's case is not quite sound at this point. The Americanshad not, on their side, fulfilled the condition of paying their English debts.
Thomas Bonneville, Paine's godson, at school in Stonington.I am indebted for this letter to Dr. Clair J. Grece, ofEngland, whose uncle, Daniel Constable, probably got it from Carver.
Derrick (or Dederick) appears by the records at White Plainsto have been brought up for trial May 19, 1806, and to have been recognized in the sum of $500 for his appearance at the next Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery, and in the meantime to keep the peace towards the (p.343) People, and especially towards Thomas Payne (sic). Paine, Christopher Hubbs, and Andrew A. Dean were recognized in $50 to appear and give evidence against Derrick. Nothing further appears in the records (examined for me by Mr. B. D. Washburn up to 1810). It is pretty certain that Paine did not press the charge.
This letter is in the possession of Mr. Grenville Kane,Tuxedo, N. Y.
I am indebted for this letter to Mr. John M. Robertson,editor of the National Reformer, London.
I am indebted for an exact copy of the letter from which thisis extracted to Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, though it is not in that institution.
In the Tarrytown Argus, October 18, 1890, appeared aninteresting notice of the Rev. Alexander Davis (Methodist), by C. K. B[uchanan] in which it is stated that Davis, a native of New Rochelle, remembered the affection of Paine, who “would bring him round-hearts and hold him on his knee.” Many such recollections of his little neighbors have been reported.
Mrs. Bayeaux is mentioned in Paine's letter about Dederick'sattempt on his life.
"Life of Albert Gallatin." Gallatin continued to visit Paine.When Paine first reached New York, 1803, he was (March 5th)entertained at supper by John Cranford. For being present Eliakim Ford, a Baptist elder, was furiously denounced, as were others of the company.
An exception was the leading Presbyterian, John Mason, wholived to denounce Channing as “the devil’s disciple.” Grant Thorburn was psalm-singer in this Scotch preacher’s church. Curiosity to see the lion led Thorburn to visit Paine, for which he was “suspended.” Thorburn afterwards made amends by fathering Cheetham’s slanders of Paine after Cheetham had become too infamous to quote.
John Stuart Mill, for instance. See also the Rev. Dr.Abbott’s “Kernel and Husk” (London), and the great work of Samuel Laing, “A Modern Zoroastrian.”
] It was bought for $300 by his friend John Oliver, whosedaughter, still residing in the house, told me that her father to the end of his life “thought everything of Paine.” John Oliver, in his old age, visited Colonel Ingersoll in order to testify against the aspersions on Paines character and habits.
"I have read," says Dean, "with good attention yourmanuscript on Dreams, and Examination of the Prophecies in the Bible. I am now searching the old prophecies, and comparing the same to those said to be quoted in the New Testament. I confess the comparison is a matter worthy of our serious attention; I know not the result till I finish; then, if you be living, I shall communicate the same to you. I hope to be with you soon.” Paine was now living with Jarvis, the artist. One evening he fell as if by apoplexy, and, as he lay, his first word was (to Jarvis): “My corporeal functions have ceased; my intellect is clear; this is a proof of immortality.”
The letter is in Mr. Frederick McGuire's collection ofMadison papers.
In Chapter X of this volume, as originally printed, therewere certain passages erroneously suggesting that Pickering might have even intercepted this important letter of September 20, 1795. I had not then observed a reference to that letter by Madison, in writing to Monroe (April 7, 1796), which proves that Paine’s communication to Washington had been read by Pickering. Monroe was anxious lest some attack on the President should be written by Paine while under his roof, – an impropriety avoided by Paine as we have seen, – and had written to Madison on the subject. Madison answers: “I have given the explanation you desired to F. A. M[uhlenberg], who has not received any letter as yet, and has promised to pay due regard to your request. It is proper you should know that Thomas Paine wrote some time ago a severe letter to the President which Pickering mentioned to me in harsh terms when I delivered a note from Thomas Paine to the Secretary of State, inclosed by T. P. in a letter to me. Nothing passed, however, that betrayed the least association of your patronage or attention to Thomas Paine with the circumstance; nor am I apprehensive that any real suspicion can exist of your countenancing or even knowing the steps taken by T. P. under the influence of his personal feelings or political principles. At the same time the caution you observe is by no means to be disapproved. Be so good as to let T. P. know that I have received his letter and handed his note to the Secretary of State, which requested copies of such letters as might have been written hence in his behalf. The note did not require any answer either to me or through me, and I have heard nothing of it since I handed it to Pickering.” At this time the Secretary of State’s office contained the President’s official recognition of Paine’s citizenship; but this application for the papers relating to his imprisonment by a foreign power received no reply, though it was evidently couched in respectful terms; as the letter was open for the eye of Madison, who would not have conveyed it otherwise. It is incredible that Washington could have sanctioned such an outrage on one he had recognized as an American citizen, unless under pressure of misrepresentations. Possibly Paine’s Quaker and republican direction of his letter to “George Washington, President of the United States,” was interpreted by his federalist ministers as an insult.
Gilbert Vale relates an anecdote which suggests that areaction may have occurred in Elisha Ward’s family: “At the time of Mr. Paine’s residence at his farm, Mr. Ward, now a coffee-roaster in Gold Street, New York, and an assistant alderman, was then a little boy and residing at New Rochelle. He remembers the impressions his mother and some religious people made on him by speaking of Tom Paine, so that he concluded that Tom Paine must be a very bad and brutal man. Some of his elder companions proposed going into Mr. Paine’s orchard to obtain some fruit, and he, out of fear, kept at a distance behind, till he beheld, with surprise, Mr. Paine come out and assist the boys in getting apples, patting one on the head and caressing another, and directing them where to get the best. He then advanced and received his share of encouragement, and the impression this kindness made on him determined him at a very early period to examine his writings. His mother at first took the books from him, but at a later period restored them to him, observing that he was then of an age to judge for himself; perhaps she had herself been gradually undeceived, both as to his character and writings.”
"I see that Cheetham has left out the part respectingHamilton and (p.385) Mrs. Reynolds, but for my own part I wish it had been in. Had the story never been publicly told I would not have been the first to tell it; but Hamilton had told it himself, and therefore it was no secret; but my motive in introducing it was because it was applicable to the subject I was upon, and to show the revilers of Mr. Jefferson that while they are affecting a morality of horror at an unproved and unfounded story about Mr. Jefferson, they had better look at home and give vent to their horror, if they had any, at a real case of their own Dagon (sic) and his Delilah.” – Paine to Colonel Fellows, July 31, 1805.
Dr. Grece showed me Paine's papier-mache snuff-box, which hisuncle had fitted with silver plate, inscription, decorative eagle, and banner of “Liberty, Equality.” It is kept in a jewel-box with an engraving of Paine on the lid.
Mr. Burger, Pelton's clerk, used to drive Paine about daily.Vale says:
“He [Burger] describes Mr. Paine as really abstemious, and when pressed to drink by those on whom he called during his rides, he usually refused with great firmness, but politely. In one of these rides, he was met by De Witt Clinton, and their mutual greetings were extremely hearty. Mr. Paine at this time was the reverse of morose, and though careless of his dress and prodigal of his snuff, he was always clean and well clothed. Mr. Burger describes him as familiar with children and humane to animals, playing with the neighboring children, and communicating a friendly pat even to a passing dog.” Our frontispiece shows Paine’s dress in 1803.
In the Concord (Mass.) Public Library there is a copy ofCheetham’s book, which belonged to Carver, by whom it was filled with notes. He says: “Cheetham was a hypocrate turned Tory,” “Paine was not Drunk when he wrote the thre pedlars for me, I sold them to a gentleman, a Jew for a dollar – Cheetham knew that he told a lie saying Paine was drunk – any person reading Cheetham’s Life of Paine that [sic] his pen was guided by prejudice that was brought on by Cheetham’s altering a peice that Paine had writen as an answer to a peice that had apeared in his paper, I had careyd the peice to Cheetham, the next Day the answer was printed with the alteration, Paine was angry, sent me to call Cheetham. I then asked how he undertook to mutilate the peice, if aney thing was rong he knew ware to find him & sad he never permitted a printer to alter what he had wrote, that the sence of the peice was spoiled – by this means their freind ship was broken up through life” (The marginalia in this volume have been copied for me with exactness by Miss E, G. Crowell, of Concord.)
"A Bone to Gnaw for Grant Thorburn." By W. Carver (1836)."He dined at my table," said Aaron Burr. "I always consideredMr. (p.395) Paine a gentleman, a pleasant companion, and a good-natured and intelligent man; decidedly temperate, with a proper regard for his personal appearance, whenever I have seen him.” (Quoted in The Beacon, No. 30, May, 1837.) “In his dress,” says Joel Barlow, “he was generally very cleanly, though careless, and wore his hair queued with side curls, and powdered, like a gentleman of the old French School. His manners were easy and gracious, his knowledge universal.”
Todd's "Joel Barlow," p. 236. The "Mr. M." was one Murray, anEnglish speculator in France, where he never resided with Paine at all.
Cheetham was at the moment a defendant in nine or ten casesfor libel.
"Speech of Counsellor Sampson; with an Introduction to theTrial of James Cheetham, Esq., for a libel on Margaret Brazier Bonneville, in his Memoirs of Thomas Paine. Philadelphia: Printed by John Sweeny, No. 357 Arch Street, 1810.” I am indebted for the use of this rare pamphlet, and for other information, to the industrious collector of causes celebres, Mr. E. B. Wynn, of Watertown, N. Y.
"Forty Years' Residence in America."Paine had always felt that Congress was in his debt for hisvoyage to France for supplies with Col. Laurens (i., p. 171). In a letter (Feb. 20, r782) to Robert Morris, Paine mentions that when Col. Laurens proposed that he should accompany him, as secretary, he was on the point of establishing a newspaper. He had purchased twenty reams of paper, and Mr. Izard had sent to St. Eustatia for seventy more. This scheme, which could hardly fail of success, was relinquished for the voyage. It was undertaken at the urgent solicitation of Laurens, and Paine certainly regarded it as official. He had ninety dollars when he started, in bills of exchange; when Col. Laurens left him, after their return, he had but two louis d’or. The Memorial sent by Paine to Congress (Jan. 21, 1808) recapitulated facts known to my reader. It was presented by the Hon. George Clinton, Jr., February 4, and referred to the Committee of Claims. On February 14th Paine wroth a statement concerning the $3,000 given him
- by Congress, which he maintained was an indemnity for injustice done him in the Deane case. Laurens had long been dead. The Committee consulted the President, whose reply I know not. Vice-President Clinton wrote (March 23, 1808) that “from the information I received at the time I have reason to believe that Mr. Paine accompanied Col. Laurens on his mission to France in the course of our revolutionary war, for the purpose of negotiating a loan, and that he acted as his secretary on that occasion; but although I have no doubt of the truth of this fact, I cannot assert it from my own actual knowledge.” There was nothing found on the Journals of Congress to show Paine’s connection with the mission. The old author was completely upset by his longing to hear the fate of his memorial, and he wrote two complaints of the delay, showing that his nerves were shattered. “If,” he says, March 7th, “my memorial was referred to the Committee of Claims for the purpose of losing it, it is unmanly policy. After so many years of service my heart grows cold towards America.”
The topographical facts were investigated by John Randel,Jr., Civil Engineer, at the request of David C. Valentine, Clerk of the Common Council, New York, his report being rendered April 6, 1864.
Another claimant to have been Paine's physician has beencited. In 1876 (N. Y. Observer, Feb. 17th) Rev. Dr. Wickham reported from a late Dr. Matson Smith, of New Rochelle, that he had been Paine’s physician, and witnessed his drunkenness. Unfortunately for Wickham he makes Smith say it was on his farm where Paine “spent his latter days.” Paine was not on his farm for two years before his death. Smith could never have attended Paine unless in 1803, when he had a slight trouble with his hands, – the only illness he ever had at New Rochelle, while the guest of a neighbor, who attests his sobriety. Finally, a friend of Dr. Smith is living, Mr. Albert Willcox, who writes me his recollection of what Smith told him of Paine. Neither drunkenness, nor any item of Wickham’s report is mentioned. He said Paine was afraid of death, but could only have heard it.
Dr. Francis' "Old New York," p.139,Nor should it be forgotten that several liberal Christians,like Hicks, were friendly towards Paine at the close of his life, whereas his most malignant enemies were of his own “Painite” household, Carver and Cheetham. Mr. William Erving tells me that he remembers an English clergyman in New York, named Cunningham, who used to visit his (Erving’s) father. He heard him say that Paine and he were friends; and that “the whole fault was that people hectored Paine, and made him say things he would never say to those who treated him as a gentleman.”
See the certificate of Nixon and Pelton to Cobbett (Vale,p.177).
Bishop Fenwick's narrative (U. S. Catholic Magazine, 1846) isquoted in the N. Y. Observer, September 27, 1877. (Extremes become friends when a freethinker is to be crucified.)
Engineer Randel (orthodox), in his topographical report tothe Clerk of the City Council (1864), mentions that the “very worthy mechanic,” Amasa Wordsworth, who saw Paine daily, told him “there was no truth in such report, and that Thomas Paine had declined saying anything on that subject [religion].” “Paine,” testifies Dr. Francis, “clung to his infidelity to the last moment of his natural life.” Dr. Francis (orthodox) heard that Paine yielded to King Alcohol, but says Cheetham wrote with “settled malignity,” and suspects “sinister motives” in his “strictures on the fruits of unbelief in the degradation of the wretched Paine.”
"On the last day men shall wear On their heads the dust, As ensign and as ornament Of their lowly trust." -- Hafiz.No sooner was Paine dead than the ghoul sat gloating uponhim. I found in the Rush papers a letter from Cheetham (July 31st) to Benjamin Rush: “Since Mr. Paine’s arrival in this city from Washington, when on his way you very properly avoided him, his life, keeping the lowest (p.419) company, has been an uninterrupted scene of filth, vulgarity, and drunkenness. As to the reports, that on his deathbed he had something like compunctious visitings of conscience with regard to his deistical writings and opinions, they are altogether groundless. He resisted very angrily, and with a sort of triumphant and obstinate pride, all attempts to draw him from those doctrines. Much as you must have seen in the course of your professional practice of everything that is offensive in the poorest and most depraved of the species, perhaps you have met with nothing excelling the miserable condition of Mr. Paine. He had scarcely any visitants. It may indeed be said that he was totally neglected and forgotten. Even Mrs. Bournville [sic], a woman, I cannot say a Lady, whom he brought with him from Paris, the wife of a Parisian of that name, seemed desirous of hastening his death. He died at Greenwich, in a small room he had hired in a very obscure house. He was hurried to his grave with hardly an attending person. An ill-natured epitaph, written on him in 1796, when it was supposed he was dead, very correctly describes the latter end of his life. He
“Blasphemes the Almighty, lives in filth like a hog, Is abandoned in death and interr’ d like a dog.”
The object of this letter was to obtain from Rush, for publication, some abuse of Paine; but the answer honored Paine, save for his heresy, and is quoted by freethinkers as a tribute.
Within a year the grave opened for Cheetham also, and he sank into it branded by the law as the slanderer of a woman’s honor, and scourged by the community as a traitor in public life.
"Life and Gospel Labors of Stephen Grellet." This "valuableyoung Friend,” as Stephen Grellet calls her, had married a Quaker named Hinsdale. Grellet, a native of France, convert from Voltaire, led the anti-Hicksites, and was led by his partisanship to declare that Elias promised him to suppress his opinions! The cant of the time was that “deism might do to live by but not to die by.” But it had been announced in Paine’s obituaries that “some days previous to his demise he had an interview with some Quaker gentlemen on the subject [of burial in their graveyard] but as he declined a renunciation of his deistical opinions his anxious wishes were not complied with.” But ten years later, when Hicks’s deism was spreading, death-bed terrors seemed desirable, and Mary (Roscoe) Hinsdale, formerly Grellet’s servant also came forward to testify that the recantation refused by Paine to the “Quaker gentlemen,” even for a much desired end, had been previously confided to her for no object at all! The story was published by one Charles Collins, a Quaker, who afterwards admitted to Gilbert Vale his doubts of its truth, adding “some of our friends believe she indulges in opiates” (Vale, p.186).
The excitement of the time was well illustrated in a notablecaricature by the brilliant artist John Wesley Jarvis. Paine is seen dead, his pillow “Common Sense,” his hand holding a manuscript, “A rap on the knuckles for John Mason.” On his arm is the label, “Answer to Bishop Watson.” Under him is written: “A man who devoted his whole life to the attainment of two objects – rights of man and freedom of conscience – had his vote denied when living, and was denied a grave when dead!” The Catholic Father O’Brian (a notorious drunkard), with very red nose, kneels over Paine, exclaiming, “Oh you ugly drunken beast!” The Rev. John Mason (Presbyterian) stamps on Paine, exclaiming,
“Ah, Tom! Tom! thou’lt get thy frying in hell; they’ll roast thee like a herring.” They’ll put thee in the furnace hot, And on thee bar the door: How the devils all will laugh To hear thee burst and roar!”
The Rev. Dr. Livingston kicks at Paine’s head, exclaiming, “How are the mighty fallen, Right folde-riddle-lol!” Bishop Hobart kicks the feet, singing:
“Right fol-de-rol, let’s dance and sing, Tom is dead, God save the king The infidel now low doth lie Sing Hallelujah-hallelujah!”
A Quaker turns away with a shovel, saying, “I’ll not bury thee.”
had broken down under the cross-examination of William Cobbett, but he had long been out of the country when the Quaker separation took place. Mary now reported that a distinguished member of the Hicksite Society, Mary Lockwood, had recanted in the same way as Paine. This being proved false, the hysterical Mary sank and remained in oblivion, from which she is recalled only by the Rev. Rip Van Winkle. It was the unique sentence on Paine to recant and yet be damned. This honor belies the indifference expressed in the rune taught children sixty years ago:Curiously enough, Mary (Roscoe) Hinsdale turned up again. She
“Poor Tom Paine! there he lies Nobody laughs and nobody cries: Where he has gone or how he fares, Nobody knows and nobody cares!”
I have before me an old fly-leaf picture, issued by Carlilein the same year. It shows Paine in his chariot advancing against Superstition. Superstition is a snaky-haired demoness, with poison-cup in one hand and dagger in the other, surrounded by instruments of torture, and treading on a youth. Behind her are priests, with mask, crucifix, and dagger. Burning faggots surround them with a cloud, behind which are worshippers around an idol, with a priest near by, upholding a crucifix before a man burning at the stake. Attended by fair genii, who uphold a banner inscribed, “Moral Rectitude.” Paine advances, uplifting in one hand the mirror of Truth, in the other his “Age of Reason.” There are ten stanzas describing the conflict, Superstition being described as holding:
"in vassalage a doating World,Till Paine and Reason burst upon the mind, And Truth and Deism their flag unfurled,”
"Whence is any right derived, but that which power confers,for persecution? Do you think to convert Mr. Eaton to your religion by embittering his existence? You might force him by torture to profess your tenets, but he could not believe them except you should make them credible, which perhaps exceeds your power. Do you think to please the God you worship by this exhibition of your zeal? If so the demon to whom some nations offer human hecatombs is less barbarous than the Deity of civilized society . . . . Does the Christian God, whom his followers eulogize as the deity of humility and peace – he, the regenerator of the world, the meek reformer authorise one man to rise against another, and, because lictors are at his beck, to chain and torture him as an infidel? When the Apostles went abroad to convert the nations, were they enjoined to stab and poison all who disbelieved the divinity of Christ’s mission? . . . The time is rapidly approaching – I hope that you, my Lord, may live to behold its arrival – when the Mahometan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community, equally sharing the benefits which arrive from its association, and united in the bonds of charity and brotherly love.”
The bones of Thomas Paine were landed in Liverpool, November21, 1819. The monument contemplated by Cobbett was never raised. There was much parliamentary and municipal excitement. A Bolton town-crier was imprisoned nine weeks for proclaiming the arrival. In 1836 the bones passed with Cobbett’s effects into the hands of a Receiver (West). The Lord Chancellor refusing to regard them as an asset, they were kept by an old day-laborer until 1844, when they passed to B. Tilley, 13 Bedford Square, London, a furniture dealer. In 1849 the empty coffin was in possession of J. Chennell, Guildford. The silver plate bore the inscription “Thomas Paine, died June 8, 1809, aged 72.” In 1854, Rev. R. Ainslie (Unitarian) told E. Truelove that he owned “the skull and the right hand of Thomas Paine,” but evaded subsequent inquiries. The removal caused excitement in America. Of Paine’s gravestone the last fragment was preserved by his friends of the Bayeaux family, and framed on their wall. In November, 1839, the present marble monument at New Rochelle was erected.
Personally I place a very high value on Paine's writings inthemselves, and not simply for their prophetic genius, their humane spirit, and their vigorous style. While his type of deism is not to me satisfactory, his religious spirit at times attains sublime heights; and while his republican formulas are at times impaired by his eagerness to adapt them to existing conditions, I do not find any writer at all, not even the most modern, who has equally worked out a scheme for harmonizing the inevitable rule of the majority with individual freedom and rights. Yet it is by no means on this my own estimate of Paine’s ideas that I rest the claims of his writings to attention and study. Their historical value is of the highest. Every page of Paine was pregnant with the life of his time. He was the enfant terrible of the times that in America, England, France, made the history that is now our international heritage: he was literally the only man who came out with the whole truth, regardless of persons: his testimony is now of record, and the gravest issues of to-day cannot be understood until that testimony is mastered.
I especially invoke to the study of Paine's Life, and ofthese volumes of his The Writings of Thomas Paine , the historians, scholars, statesmen of the mother of nations – England. I have remarked a tendency in some quarters to preserve the old odium against Paine, no longer maintainable in respect of his religion or his character, by transferring it to his antagonism to the government of England in the last century. And it is probable that this prejudice may be revived by the republication (p.xxii) in this edition of several of his pamphlets, notably that on the “Invasion of England” in the Appendix (to which some of Paine’s most important works have been relegated). But if thinking Englishmen will rid themselves of that counterfeit patriotism now called “Jingoism,” and calmly study those same essays, they will begin to understand that while Paine arraigned a transient misgovernment of England, his critics arraign England itself by treating attacks on minions of George III. as if hostile to the England of Victoria. The widespread hostility to England recently displayed in America has with some justice been traced to the kind of teaching that has gone on for nearly four generations in American schools under the name of history; but what remedy can there be for this disgraceful situation so long as English historians are ignorantly keeping their country, despite the friendship of its people for Americans, in the attitude of a party to a ‘vendetta’ transmitted from a discredited past? And much the same may be said concerning the strained relations between England and France, which constitute a most sad, and even scandalous, feature of our time. About a hundred years ago an English government was instigating parochial mobs to burn “Tom Paine” in effigy for writing the Rights of Man, little reflecting that it was making the nation it misgoverned into an effigy for American and French democrats to burn, on occasion, for a century to come. Paine, his name and his personal wrongs, passed out of the case altogether, like the heart of the hollow “Tom Paine Tree” at Bromley: but like its living foliage the principles he represented are still renewed, and flourish under new names and forms. But old names and forms are coined in prejudices. The Jeffersonian in America and the Girondin in France are now in power, and are sometimes victimized by a superstition that George III is still monarch of England, and Pitt still his Minister. Meanwhile the credit of English Literature commands the civilized world. The next great writer will be the historian who shall without flattery, and with inflexible justice and truth, examine and settle these long-standing accounts with the past; and to him I dedicate (p.xxiii) in advance these volumes, wherein he will find valuable resources and materials.
Here then close my labors on the history and the writings of the great Commoner of Mankind, founder of the Republic of the World, and emancipator of the human mind and heart, THOMAS PAINE. – Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. iv, Introduction, p.xxi-xxiii.