Thermopolis independent (Thermopolis, Wyo.), May 30, 1924
Memorial to Be Erected at New Rochelle, N.Y.By JOHN DICKINSON SHERMAN
THOMAS PAINE, patriot, philosopher and author, will be the central figure of Memorial Day at New Rochelle, N. Y. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association is to erect a memorial building and ground will be broken then with appropriate ceremonies. The site purchased by the association is a part of the land grant to Paine by the State of New York in 1784. In front of the building stands the Tom Paine monument, erected eighty-five years ago by Gilbert Vale, a New York editor, author of the earliest authentic “Life of Thomas Paine” published in America. It is surmounted by a bronze bust, placed there at the Paine celebration of 1899. Near by is the spot where Paine was buried in 1809. Across the street from the building is a lake which will be converted into a park in Paine’s memory.
On the ground floor of the Thomas Paine Memorial Building will be a museum, which will contain a great array of Paine memorabilia, including first and rare editions of his several works, and correspondence with Washington, Adams, Jefferson and other leaders of Revolutionary times.
Paine’s life story is very much more like romance than fact. He was born in Thetford, England, in 1737. His father was a Quaker. In early life he was a stay-maker and a teacher. Then he became a petty government official and was dismissed for trifling irregularities. He arrived in Philadelphia in November of 1774. He became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, which began publication in January of 1775.
Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, was published January 10, 1776. The publication made him for the moment the best-known and most influential writer in America. Although actual hostilities had been in progress since Lexington and Concord, the armed resistance of colonists to Britain was still resistance to tyranny rather than a fight for independence. Despite obvious exaggerations and crudities, Paine’s arguments for independence were unanswerable. Anyway, six months later, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Paine enlisted as a private in the Continental Army in 1776. Just before Washington crossed the Delaware River late in that year, Paine wrote by a campfire on a drumhead the immortal words of The Crisis, No. I:
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
General Washington had those words read to the army. No wonder Washington and his “Ragged Continentals” surprised, outgeneraled and walloped the British at Trenton and Princeton!
In 1777 Paine was made secretary of the Committee of Foreign Affairs of the Continental Congress. In 1781 he and John Laurens went to France for aid, returning with money and supplies. About this time Paine was living at Bordentown, N. J., neglected by Congress despite efforts in his behalf by Washington and others.
In 1784 the State of New York gave Paine a confiscated Loyalist estate of 277 acres at New Rochelle. Pennsylvania gave him 500 pounds sterling. Congress eventually voted him $3,000, “not as a payment for services, but as a gratuity.”
The appearance in 1790 of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution called forth a reply from Paine entitled The Rights of Man. It was dedicated to Washington and translated into French. It made such an impression that the British government undertook to suppress it and punish the author. In December 1792 Paine was tried for high treason in the Court of the King’s Bench. He was ably defended by Erskine, but was convicted and outlawed.
Paine, in the meantime, had gone to France. There three departments chose him as their delegate to represent them in the convention. Paine was one of the nine members who composed the committee to draw up a constitution for France. He was an active and prominent member of the convention. He tried hard to save Louis XVI from the guillotine and thereby incurred the enmity of Robespierre and other Terrorist leaders.
Paine was arrested December 27, 1793, by order of the Committee of Public Safety and was confined in the Luxembourg. He escaped the guillotine by what he afterward described as an accident.
Prisoners to the number of 168 were taken out one night and beheaded the next day. Paine was in the list. His door, however, opened outward and swung back against the wall. The inside of the door was therefore outward when it stood open. A careless warder chalked the inside of the door by mistake. When the prisoners were later removed, his door was closed and there was no death mark on the outside. Thus he escaped execution
James Monroe, American minister to France, obtained Paine’s release in November 1794. Paine re-entered the convention and remained until the establishment of the Directory in October 1795. Paine returned to the United States in the fall of 1802 and lived for a time at Bordentown and later at New Rochelle.
Paine’s last years were not happy. His Age of Reason had been published in Paris in 1794–95. It was this work, with its violent assault on the Bible and orthodox Christianity, that caused Paine to be branded as an atheist. Americans of the early nineteenth century generally believed that a man who had written such things and taken part in the French Revolution must necessarily be a bad man in every respect. So they would have none of him. He died in New York City on June 8, 1809.
Paine’s will provided that he should be buried on his New Rochelle estate, with a headstone bearing his name and age and inscribed:
“Author of ‘Common Sense.’”
He was buried there and for ten years his remains lay undisturbed. Thereafter their experiences were as strange as those of Thomas Paine in life.
In 1819 William Cobbett, a noted English radical, was in America. He dug up Paine’s coffin and took it to England. Explaining his action, he said:
“America has failed to honor the great man from whose brain sprang the idea of American independence. Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolkshire, and all England will rejoice to honor this great thinker and philosopher.”
Cobbett planned an impressive funeral and a magnificent tomb. England, however, showed little enthusiasm for honoring the author of the pamphlet that had helped cost her the American colonies. The result was that Cobbett placed the coffin in the attic of his home at Normandy Farm in Surrey. Cobbett died in 1835, and soon afterward the Paine coffin disappeared
In the meantime, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association had been formed in America. The late Moncure D. Conway, its first president and the author of the most exhaustive biography of Paine, conducted a persistent search for Paine’s remains. In London in 1900 he obtained a small portion of Paine’s brain.
William M. Van Der Weyde, then president of the association, continued the search and secured some locks of Paine’s hair. It now seems certain that the remainder of Paine’s remains were secretly buried in England in the 1870s.
Thomas Paine—genius, agitator, philosopher, patriot, and “atheist”—evidently knew himself and his own work. That is why, when he came to die, he ordered on his headstone:
AUTHOR OF “COMMON SENSE.”