The New York Times, June 19, 1892. PAGE NUMBER 19
NEW PUBLICATIONS
CONWAY’S LIFE OF THOMAS PAINE. The Life of Thomas Paine, with a History of His Political and Religious Career in America, France, and England. By Moncure Daniel Conway. With Portrait of Paine by William Cobbet, full-length portraits of Paine. Two Volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Mr. Conway has made an exhaustive study of the career of Paine. It is the result of investigations ranging over several years, during which he has personally visited every scene associated with the eventful career of Paine’s life. He has not only been over the ground in Thetford, Rochelle, and New-York, but Thetford, London, and other places, hunting up letters or documents in private or public archives, he has gone in pursuit of them. Making use of unpublished manuscripts, and even extending his researches to town and country records of proceedings taken in Paine’s name, or the attack on Paine’s life in New-Rochelle. Previous to the work of writing Paine’s life have afforded an slight aid, and the number of the documents he has found himself runs well up into the thousands.
Biographies of this class are not too common in these times. Mr. Conway’s volumes afford evidence of such unusual thorough and unresting devotion that they stand somewhat apart. They make up a documentary history, which alone any true estimate can be formed of Paine’s life. Nearly a century since had passed away the period of Paine’s achievement of character, mental and moral teachings. Those who read today the works which caused the decree of obloquy and denial of rights, the denunciations made in his old age and after his death, can only look with astonishment at the changes time has wrought. To Paine more than to any other man have honors are come round, and the words of Walt Whitman, spoken to Mr. Conway in his old age, will suggest the value of these volumes as an unbounded tribute. Whitman admits that Paine had been “infamously lied about”; he was neither “drunk or immoral”; all that his chosen people did, was a high-minded gentleman,” and was “among the best and truest of men.” In the course of his researches, the author has found everywhere an appreciation of the service rendered by Paine. Generous assistance has come to him from a most unexpected Frenchman, with no faiths and no faith, and nowhere has he encountered either political or religious prejudice.
Mr. Conway finds the first impulse in Paine’s character tracing it back to the place he was born in. Here again may be seen that persistent influence which a man’s early environment exerts over him throughout life, making him in the end more of his birthplace than a product and growth as well. These are potent influences from which no man can escape. They help to make him what he is and what he is to remain. In early youth Paine had seen the corrupting influence of the aristocracy and the evils of conformity. He had seen his fellow-countrymen “who purloined parks and manors,” and their standing children sentencing to the gallows for mere thefts instigated by the misery into which by the same secular and abjectness, the town corporation held in the hollow of a Duke’s hand, a government corrupt to the core, and people baffled in attempts to obtain redress — that the youth remembering his unhappy boyhood and an unsuccessful career in the excise — seemed to indicate many of the very evils he had all his years struggling.
Paine came to America a few years before the Revolution. He was introduced by Franklin to Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, who gave Paine employment upon his son. “I am an exciseman,” Paine told him, Bache afterward declared, Paine among the most interesting Englishmen who were then wavering and undecided about independence. Bache further said, though with exaggeration, that the cause of Liberty owed quite as much of Paine as to the sword of Washington. “Common Sense” was written, however, only when he decided on the true course which seemed inevitable, and Mr. Conway brings out with some new proof that the author of the anti-slavery clause finally cut out of the original Declaration of Independence, while Cobbett declared Paine was the actual draftsman of the Declaration. Paine was its author. Conway also notes that Paine did not confine himself to writing pamphlets and political tracts, but wrote some eighteen songs, and practically gave to the Colonies the copyrights to the country. In securing the Revolution he had already gone a large share. The plan was “concerted by Paine” according to the statement of Col. Lawrence who “got the glory and the pay for it.” Paine sought no reward. On the Clerkship of the Assembly, but the greater service of his country without a salary was gone.
Paine’s relations to Washington afford occasion to more than one remark. That Washington played a high estimate on Paine’s powers will hardly come into question, for he wrote to Paine in 1796, “And no one was I had more confidence in.” The importance of Paine in his own career, and service in his power. But a charge made against Paine by Washington himself and Gouverneur Morris is made chiefly responsible for Paine’s being thrown into prison in France under sentence of death. Conway attributes the charge to Washington’s too easy disposition to be influenced by Morris, who was then going on with England, when to take the side of Paine at that moment would have offended England. Washington on both occasions ignored Paine, who had ability to weigh any injustice against an interest of diplomacy.
As for Lafayette, Mr. Conway almost denounces in strong terms and to it attributes a good deal of Paine’s imprisonment. Of Morris’s private life while in Paris Conway writes with great frankness. The accusation on which the arrest of Paine was made, in the end, was his American citizenship. His atrocious burning. Mr. Conway notices Paine’s extraordinary statement, “I have been in prison for a year. Letters from Morris would have been grateful enough; had him be was not an American citizen. Monroe is given great credit for kindness toward Paine and a disinclination to deny him, in contrast to his predecessor. So when Secretary of State, this was particularly true, a fact which Conway devotes a few pages to a full and careful statement. After coming out it was left to Monroe to provide for Paine. Monroe, it appears, made “the first positive assertion of American citizenship, and the prison door flew open.” Paine had been in prison almost without clothes or food; and by the way distinctly says he believed he had been poisoned. A large portion of Morris was given to his having come to America again, and to live at New-Rochelle. Officials, when he first arrived, reminded him that he was not an American citizen. Monroe in good faith tried to have a place to live at. He was given an American home, voted “for the detention of three English spies,” and not long after found that his perpetual bombardment was too heavy for some people. And after those who “save the liberty” of the country, the liberal in France and England show that Paine lived “by the hands of English Ministry.” Hence the world can now “point to the doings of an English Ministry.” Hence the world can now point to a declaration regarding “the liberty of England’s King.”
On Paine’s reply to Burke, known as “The Rights of Man,” Mr. Conway writes many pages. He notices the historical result as to production, the dedication to Washington, the storming of the book, immediate following, the Frenchman, the two portraits of Paine and the English decree of libel, the arrest, the loss of the copies. The Town Crier of Bolton, who declared that “Thomas Paine is a liar, for he has found in it neither the rights of man nor common sense,” though it is the “Age of Reason” and the reception it met with in America. In old age Paine returned, to support himself and his family, to meet with abuse and maltreatment from ministers and people. He “died and went to York.” He was above all “a professional Revolutionary,” and it is during our revolutionary era of whom it can be said “he looked himself in the face of his Lord, and in that law did he mortified his own feelings in himself,” the well-known attack on Paine of John Adams, the fact that Willett Hicks and Hicks said that Paine was “rational and sane to the last.” The present resting place of Paine’s bones no one knows where they were finally buried, but where they were buried remains as sealed up as if they had not existed. He concludes with saying that Paine’s highest tribute would have been born in the early days of the republic, that it will be teaching from that heart whose every pulse beat for humanity.