Pall Mall Gazette – Thursday 03 March 1887
TOM PAINE’S TAVERN.
The old Washington Hotel, of Bordentown, New Jersey, U.S., where Thomas Paine drank big draughts of brandy, and the Bohemian Prince Murat got his whisky, was sold last month by the executor of the estate of John Rogers. Considerable other real estate was involved in the sale, but the most interest was taken in the transfer of the old inn, which became the property of Richard Jacques for a consideration of 15,000 dols. No other hotel in New Jersey has associated with it so much interest as the old Washington.
The old tavern was the first in the ancient town, and much of its past history has been lost to the local chroniclers. Thomas Paine, the author of the “Age of Reason” and pamphlets of less odour, occupied lodgings on Park-avenue, where he did considerable writing, and every night was sure to find him in the tavern, where he delivered weighty arguments against the orthodox beliefs of the day. His nightly discourses were like his writings, pungent and forcible, and many of the good members of the meeting gladly paid for his brandy-and-water to help on the mental excitement that produced the able discourses on atheism, delivered in short sentences both epigrammatical and poetical.
About ten years ago, when the late mine host John Rogers was looking in the loft for a missing castor of a bed on which Murat slept, he found Tom Paine’s fiddle. The patriotic essayist could not get any comfort out of religion. He reduced fiddling to a science, and kept many pairs of feet moving in old-fashioned reels and minuets before the open fireplace in the dining-room. It is given out that Paine was a good-natured disputant, and never became angry. His delight was to work his opponent in debate up to fever heat and laugh at him. The more brandy he drank the more logical he became, and he was responsible for the burning of much midnight, or rather early morning, oil. He was not a bar-room lounger, for all the good men of Bordentown were not above gathering around the hospitable fire of the inn, yet his rather Democratic ways opened him to many sallies of the church-going folks, who even to-day will tell you that “Tom Paine had a cloven foot.”
The recollections of Prince Murat, a real live Prince who never raised himself to the dignity of his title, are fresher and freer. There is not the uncertainty of tradition in the accounts concerning him. At least a dozen men in the group before the auctioneer often stood at the same bar and drank gin and sugar with the unworthy son of the King of Naples. One venerable old man, who boasts of eighty-five years, and who has a memory that would be valuable to a college freshman, pointed out the identical spot under the shed where the unworthy Prince, son of a worthy King, was one day found playing a game for a few coins with the coloured ostler, who went to his grave boasting of the victory he once made over the nephew of the great Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe. Murat was the hero of the bar-room loungers; his appearance in the little, low bar-room was always a promise of free whisky to those whose chief occupation was to see the old yellow stage coach come and go. The old veterans tell, with much gusto, how he managed to get his score chalked down on the little shelf where the yellow-brown ginger cakes hardened and grew stronger every day. With the instincts of a true Frenchman, Murat always made his whisky and gambling obligations debts of honour, and when his good wife received a remittance, or his dignified uncle, the unfortunate King Joseph, opened his purse strings, she saw the score promptly wiped out and left a deposit for the next visit.