The New York Times, July 20, 1901. PAGE NUMBER 25
Thomas Paine and the Junius Letters.
To The New York Times Saturday Review.
WILLIAM HENRY BURR, A. M.
New York, July 17, 1901.
I claim to know more of the life and works of Thomas Paine than any other man. Rev. John W. Chadwick, in The New York Times Saturday Review of July 13, says: “Of other follies the most rank is that which identifies Junius with Thomas Paine. Such was the vanity of Paine that he could no more have disowned so great a feat than he could have written Goldsmith’s Vicar.”
The folly of the above assertion is made apparent by the fact long ago adduced by me, that Paine was unknown to the world until 1791, when, at the age of fifty-four, he burst forth like a meteor in the literary and political world by the publication of the “Rights of Man,” in answer to Edmund Burke on the French Revolution. All through the American war he signed himself “Common Sense,” and his only open publication prior to his return to England was a “Dissertation on Government; the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money,” in 1786.
Paine was the most secretive of men, and his reluctance to fathering his own essays is manifested by an apologetic statement in the preface to Part II. of the “Rights of Man,” in which he says:
“Had he [Mr. Burke] not urged the controversy I had most probably been a silent man.”
Paine continued to write anonymously up to the end of his life in 1809, though for the most part openly. I have a rare pamphlet, published at Washington in 1803, entitled “Plain Sense; or, Sketches of Political Frenzy and Federal Fraud and Folly.” It is unquestionably by Paine. Many other of his later anonymous writings appear in his published works.
The Francis-Junius theory is completely exploded. In 1895 two Junius letters were found, printed after the regular series, and in another London newspaper than that in which all the previous letters appeared. One of the two letters was published five months after Sir Philip Francis embarked for India, and it alluded to events that occurred since his departure. The other letter, a year earlier, was on “Priestcraft,” a subject which Junius had treated so gingerly that no one could know whether he was a Christian or a skeptic. This letter foreshadowed Paine’s “Age of Reason,” written twenty years later. But Francis was a High Churchman; he had recently visited the Pope, and he commended the Papacy.
Long before 1895 I disproved the Francis-Junius theory by an alibi, and subsequently I learned that half a dozen others had been pointed out in Notes and Queries.
Not a single fact has ever been adduced incompatible with Paine’s authorship of the Junius letters, and it is equally certain that he drafted the Declaration of Independence.