In celebration of the 250th anniversary, a historic marker was recently placed at the Paine Monument adjacent to the TPHA Headquarters on North Avenue in New Rochelle, NY. The monument was first erected in 1839, with money raised through “public contributions.” It was situated just a few feet from where Paine was buried in 1809. His former 277-acre farm, a gift from the State of New York for his role in America’s independence, extended up the hill. The monument was repaired and rededicated on May 30, 1881. The bronze bust, sculpted by Wilson McDonald, was added to the monument and dedicated on May 30, 1899. It was rededicated in 1905, when the City of New Rochelle took ownership.

An iron fence protects the monument, and, as a result, many people do not know that all four sides of the obelisk have famous Paine-isms carved into the stone. The new marker shares these timeless messages.

ON THE WEST SIDE

“The world is my country… to do good is my religion”

Paine’s motto

“The palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

Common Sense, January 10, 1776

ON THE SOUTH SIDE

Two long quotations cover this side. The top features the famous opening paragraph from Crisis I that begins:

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

The second offers the long first paragraph of Crisis XIII which begins:

“The times that try men’s souls are over and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.“

ON THE NORTH SIDE

“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”

Age of Reason, Part 1, Chap. 1

“It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

Age of Reason, Part 1, Chapter 1

ON THE EAST SIDE

Two more long quotations from Age of Reason, Part 1, Chapter IX, cover this side. The first begins with:

“It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite.”

The second begins with:

“Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in immensity of the creation.”

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In April 1797, as Napoleon Bonaparte continued his meteoric rise, Thomas Paine made his way to 4 Rue du Théatre Français. With his knock on the door, life changed for Nicolas and Marguerite Bonneville and their very young children. Paine had grown close to the couple during the early days of the French Revolution. Now, stateless and homeless in the wake of the Committee of Public Safety’s Terror, an 11-month incarceration that almost killed him, and his long recuperation at the home of American Minister to France, James Monroe, Paine had been invited to take refuge at the Bonneville home. Madame Bonneville expected the great man to stay for a fortnight. Instead, he stayed for six years.

Surrounded by the Bonneville’s circle of writers and intellectuals—headstrong, passionate, and yet still optimistic even in the wake of so much death—Paine new companions rekindled his revolutionary spirit. The Bonnevilles were great admirers of Paine. They even named their fourthborn son, Thomas Paine Bonneville, in the great man’s honor the year after Paine arrived at their home, and asked him to serve as godfather. As Paine’s fortnight turned into months and then years, his presence as a doting, albeit eccentric, “grandfather” became the norm, while the family’s hospitality towards him—between 1797 and 1802—became the foundation of an abiding friendship.

In 1802, Nicolas Bonneville was arrested by Napoleon and his printing presses were seized just as Paine was finally preparing to return to the United States. Paine saw a way to pay the struggling Bonnevilles back for their generosity, so Madame Bonneville and three of her four boys—12-year old Louis, 5-year-old Benjamin and 4-year-old Thomas, sailed to America shortly after Paine’s return, planning to stay until Nicolas could get back onto a solid financial footing. Instead, for the next seven years in New York, this “odd couple” became a part of Paine’s sometimes eccentric orbit. Little Nicolas was too frail to travel and remained in France, while Louis, the oldest, was unhappy in New York, so arrangements were made for him to return to France and to the care of a family friend until he could be reunited with his father.

By 1808, prone to a growing litany of frailties, Paine was not the easiest person to be around. The small town of New Rochelle, 22 miles from New York, was no panacea for a happy life. There was an ill-executed attempt on Paine’s life by a disgruntled workman, and the town had infuriatingly refused to let him vote in an election, alleging that he was not an American citizen. As a result, the Paine-Bonneville “family” began spending more time in what is now Greenwich Village. Paine began facing physical struggles. A bad fall and episodes of transient ischemia made it difficult for him to hold a pen. But he was still busy trying to make the world a better place.

As Paine shuttled between a series of rooming houses, Madame Bonneville became his occasional secretary: “I …went regularly to see him twice a week; but, he said to me one day: “I am here alone, for all these people are nothing to me, day after day, week after week, month after month, and you don’t come to see me.” An aging, ailing man, who thrived on arguments in the service of great ideas, now roiled against the infirmities of old age and his confinement in lonely, shabby rooms. At the same time, the futures of the Bonneville boys weighed heavily upon Madame Bonneville. It was the central bond between Paine and her.

On June 8, 1809, Thomas Paine—physically diminished but with his mind still clear—died peacefully. With the reading of Paine’s will, the responsibilities for his burial and the execution of his estate lay on Madame Bonneville’s shoulders.

Whatever scholars may make of Paine’s feelings about Madame Bonneville, and hers about him, there can be no disputing her position as the principal beneficiary in Paine’s will. His bequest included “shares, movables, and money… for her own sole and separate use, and at her disposal, notwithstanding her coverture.” Small amounts were dispensed to old friends, including Nicolas, but the most significant chunk, including 100 acres in New Rochelle, went to Madame Bonneville: “…in trust for her children …their education and maintenance, until they come to the age of twenty-one years, in order that she may bring them well up, give them good and useful learning, and instruct them in their duty to God.”

Madame Bonneville wrote, “Paine, doubtless, considered me and my children as strangers in America. His affection for us was…great and sincere.” His generous bequest to the boys in his will proves that.

In March of 1810, Marguerite Bonneville, with Paine’s dear friend Walter Morton by her side, took a stage coach to Albany, and, associated with Paine’s estate, posted a bond of $14,000—an amount that would today be the equivalent in purchasing power of about $359,973. Paine had indeed provided for his “boys”. Thomas Paine—physically diminished but with his mind still clear—died peacefully. With the reading of Paine’s will, the responsibilities for his burial and the execution of his estate lay on Madame Bonneville’s shoulders.

What of Paine’s “Dear Boys”?

Benjamin Bonneville

Paine loved the youngest Bonneville boys. After his death, Madame Bonneville, with a boost from Lafayette, petitioned Thomas Jefferson for a place for Benjamin at West Point. He rose to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army as well as gaining fame as an explorer of the American northwest. The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Pontiac Bonneville are named for him.

Thomas Paine Bonneville

Thomas Paine Bonneville did not fare as well. On January 1, 1812, now dropping the “Paine,” the adolescent Thomas became a midshipman in the U.S. Navy. He was awarded a sword of valor for his service during a fierce battle, but Thomas was a discipline problem. Heroism and discipline did not go hand in hand. Thomas resigned from the Navy in 1816. In November 1820, he enlisted as an Army private for a five-year tour, took a 2-month leave for illness, left on March 26, 1821, and vanished from history’s gaze.

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The complete essay from the TPNHA Collection:

Although pious legends picture Thomas Paine as terrified of death, his only fear was lest he should live too long, and suffer like his parents from helpless age. When at length death was plainly approaching his only dread was excited by the zealous aggressions of proselytizers, whose eagerness for some miraculous manifestations from heaven or hell, at the death bed of the famous deist was likely, he foresaw, to fabricate a fabulous fulfillment. He therefore sent for the widow of friend Elihu Palmer, who had been left in poverty, to watch beside him till his death. His next anxiety was lest fanatics, in their disappointment that he was neither converted nor carried off by Satan, should subject his body to indignities, and, his parents having been Quakers, he requested burial in the Friends’ graveyard in New York. This was refused solely because of his deism, nothing whatever being alleged against his character. He was buried at New Rochelle on the farm presented to him by the State of New York at the close of the Revolution because of his services in that struggle.

And even then Paine entered on his posthumous career. There was no Quaker formula against deism, and the refusal of a grave to Paine, resented by some members of that Society, began a controversy which as I believe resulted twenty years later in a split, and the establishment of the rationalistic Society now known as “Hicksite Quakers”.

A plain headstone was placed at Paine’s grave, but bits of it were chipped away by visitors. A Fragment is sometimes shown at Paine’s celebrations in New York, and the destruction of the headstone ascribed to orthodox vandalism. But Gilbert Vale, who in 1837 edited The Beacon, said in that paper that it was done by “admiring visitors”. In his paper of July 15, 1837, Vale says: “After Cobbett violated the grave, and removed the bones from the remains of Paine, the headstone as broken, and pieces successively removed by different visitors; one large fragment was preserved by a lady in an opposite cottage, in which Mr. Paine had sometimes boarded; but this fragment gradually suffered diminution, as successive visitors begged a piece of what they could no longer steal. To preserve the last remnant the lady has had it plastered up in a wall.” The cottage alluded to is the Bayeaux house, and the lady Mrs. Badeau, who lived there with her mother, the widow Bayeaux, when Paine was a boarder. Her son, Mr. Albert Badeau, whom I visited in New Rochelle in 1891, preserved various relics of Paine. He saw Cobbett’s workmen digging up Paine’s bones about dawn.

In September 1819 Cobbett wrote from America a public letter to Lord Folkstone in which he advised him to read Paine’s “Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance”: “and then blush at the use of the words ‘Lower Orders’; blush to think that this man, born in humble life, knew more than all the ‘higher orders’ put together. Yet while such a fellow as pensioned Johnson, ‘that slave of state’, stands in colossal marble in St. Paul’s, Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America. There, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will. Yes, my Lord, among the pleasures that I promise myself, is that of seeing the name of Paine honoured in every part of England, where base corruption caused him, while alive, to be burnt in effigy. Never will England be what it ought to be until the marble of Pitt’s monument is converted into a monument to the memory of Paine.”

In the same month the remains were dug up. “Our expedition”, wrote Cobbett, “set out from New York in the middle of the night; got to the place (twenty-two miles off) at peak of day; took up the coffin entire; and just as we found it, goes to England. Let it be considered the act of the Reformers of England, Scotland and Ireland. In their name we opened the grave, and in their name will the tomb be raised.” (Cobbett’s Register xxxv. P.382.) According to The Beacon (Dec. 27,1845) a little finger of Paine was left in America, and was “in the possession of a friend <?Quaker> on Long Island.”

In Manordes’s “Biographical Treasury” it is said, “Many however assert that Cobbett did not take that trouble, but brought over from America the remains of a criminal who had been executed.” There is not however the slightest room for doubt on this point. Not only did Mr. Albert Badeau of New Rochelle witness the removal of the coffin, but the grave itself long bore the like witness. Dr. Clair J. Grece of Redhill has sent me an extract from a diary kept by his uncle Danial Constable while in America, who visited the grave on July 26,1822, and says “The grave is surrounded by a stone wall 16 feet by 12 and l8 inches thick, about 4 feet high. The grave is sunk in about the depth of a coffin. Some of the neighbors aided the three men who came with a wagon a little before day. They say had the proper authorities had known in time they would prevented the outrage.”

An aged Quaker informed me that a number of “Friends” who were on the “Elizabeth” when Cobbett came aboard with the big box, at New York, left the ship on learning its contents; but those who looked for a striking judgment on the vessel were disappointed. Cobbett with his strange freight landed at Liverpool on November 21,1819.

Before relating the adventures of Paine’s bones it may be of interest to record that the project of a monument to Paine at New Rochelle originated in 1837 with Gilbert Vale, who compiled a biography of Paine, and Mrs. Badeau, who, with her mother Mrs. Bayeaux, – both orthodox, – preserved an affectionate memory of the author and his sojourn as a boarder in their home at New Rochelle. The graceful monument was designed by John Frazee, an eminent architect, gratuitously, and was constructed at James’s marble works in New Rochelle. The portrait was cut from a medal of the time, owned by a Mr. Gill and is – or was- a good likeness. The monument is not exactly over the grave but near its head. The farmer into whose hands the surrounding land had passed would not permit the committee to reach the twelve square feet which had been reserved inviolably for Paine’s grave, by Madame Bonneville, so they had to purchase, at a cost of $50, twenty square feet of ground at the corner of the road and the lane leading to Paine’s house. The largest subscription for the monument was that of Hiram Parker, $30, the others having mostly one dollar each. The total cost, including the land, was $1,634. The monument was erected in November 1839, in the presence of about fifty persons, but without any formalities or speeches.

The reaction caused by the French Revolution was beginning to subside when Cobbett brought to England the bones of its famous outlaw, who, the Attorney General had declared in 1792, should never enter the country again except in vinculis. The “Painites” were reviving interest in their hero, and Richard Carlile had just been sent to prison for publishing the “Age of Reason”. And by the way, soon after his arrival Cobbett visited Carlile in gaol: the prisoner said “Ah, had I been in America, they would not have thrown me in prison.” “No”, replied Cobbett, “they would have tarred and feathered you.”

Cobbett’s enterprise was met with mingled wrath and ridicule. Probably most people now have no association with the incident except the four lines of Byron (following an equally cynical epitaph on Pitt) in a letter to Moore, from Ravcuna, Jan. 2,1820

“In digging up your bones, Tom Paine, Will Cobbett has done well: You visit him on earth again, He’ll visit you in hell.”

“Pray”, adds Byron, “let not these versiculi go forth with my name except among the initiated, because my friend H. has foamed into a reformer, and I greatly fear will subside into Newgate.” Even while the poet was writing, his friend H. – John Cam Hobhouse – was already in Newgate. It was for a pamphlet on Lord Erskine, so severely contrasting his earlier with his reactionary position, that it must almost have seemed to summon Paine as a Banquo at the feast of his once noble defender, but afterwards ennobled prosecutor. In fact Byron, in his Southern retreat, interested only in his alter ego Don Juan, was little aware of the political situation in England, and took the laughter over Paine’s bones to be more genuine than it was. The merriment was not that of the Tories, but rather an effort of the old Whigs to hooh-pooh an incident fallen at the most serious crisis since the French Revolution.

In August had occurred the terrible suppression of the mass meeting at Manchester (“Peterloo”). The trials of the Carliles and other heretical publishers and writers were filling the radicals with consternation. The storm was rising concerning Queen Caroline around whom the liberals were gathering with intense wrath against the Prince Regent whose full reign was at hand. Eight days after the arrival of Paine’s bones at Liverpool three different Bills were introduced into Parliament, all heavily loaded guns aimed against the recovery by the people of rights lost during the French revolution – the Seditious Meetings Bill, the Training Prevention Bill, and the Blasphemous Libels Bill. The promoters of these measures were not slow in availing themselves of the Paine-Cobbett incident. On December2 Mr. Wilmot made a strong point of it in the House of Commons:

“Does anybody advocate the principle of these meetings? If such a man exists it can only be in the person of the individual just returned from America, who has dug up the unhallowed bones of the blasphemer, and has brought them to this country for the purpose of creating a frenzied feeling in favour of his projects, and like old John Ziska, who desired that his skin be made into a drum to rouse his countrymen, wished to stir up impiety and disaffection by the exhibition of this mummery to the initated people of this country.”

After that, the Whig ridicule began, as if by mot d’ordre, and on December 17 a leading opponent of the government Bills, Earl Grosvenor, utilized the ridicule to prove them unnecessary:

“To prove still further the feelings by which people are actuated, I beg leave to mention the way in which a posthumous production, the bones of Thomas Paine, has been treated in this country. The person by whom that vile experiment has been tried found that he had a little mistaken the feeling and character of the people of England. Was there ever any subject treated with more laughter, contempt, and derision than the introduction of these miserable bones, – whether the bones of Thomas Paine or not I will not undertake to decide.”

Mr. Edward Smith of Walthamstow, Cobbett’s able biographer, does not share my suspicion that this ridicule was artificial. He says that Paine’s religious heresies had obliterated his political ideas.” In England he was known by his theology; and was branded as an Atheist by the hirelings who could not, or dare not try to refute him.” He reproaches Cobbett for not knowing that such things do not strike or interest the English mind. But two years later the performance was imitated by the importation in a ship of what was left of the bones of Major Andre for burial in Westminster Abbey, and Cobbett wrote: “All the differences between me and the Duke of York is, that I bring home the bones of an Englishman famed throughout the world for his talents and writings; and that the Duke brings home the bones of one who was hanged as a spy.” As for the ridicule, it was, apart from newspaper paragraphs, chiefly represented by some anonymous rhymes written with skill, but with an affectation of rudeness, and printed in the cheapest form. The date of the first effusion in December1 819, about three weeks after the bones were heard of in London, and it was entitled, “The Political House that Jack Built”. In a picture Cobbett is seen in a boat marked “Rights of Man”, seated on a coffin, and rowed by two Negroes.

“B is a boat that used to ply Across the Brooklyn Ferry; To Market Slip that’s called the Fly, A pretty kind of wherry.

“And ’tis constructed on a plan That’s best to cut the waves: The name of it is rights of man, And rowed by Negro slaves.

“This boat Bill Cobb hired for a week, And entered on a trip, A passage over sea to seek In Merchant Brig or Ship

“A coffin with him too he took When Paine’s Bones lay in state, And tried each bark from Sandy Hook, In vain – quite to Hell’s Gate.

“And thither was his utmost scope, Nor farther has he been; The massive door refused to ope Just yet – to let him in.”

Another piece is headed “sketches of the Life of Billy Cobb and the death of Tommy Pain”. The woodcut here shows Cobbett under an apple tree, his hat on the ground full of apples, with Paine’s skeleton on one side seizing him by the throat, and on the other the Devil touching him on the shoulder. The muses tell that when Paine was dying the Devil appeared and said his skull was now to be buried “for ever and ever.”

“One boon and only one I crave”, Said Thomas with a sigh, “Let it be till there pass my grave A caitiff worse than I.”

The Devil thinks it quite safe to agree to this, but when Cobbett touches the grave Paine springs up, and attacks him on old scores, for Cobbett had reproduced “Oldys”‘ libels in America, and was connected to Painism only in after years. The Devil is at first rather pleased with the fight, being afraid that he may be “superceded” on his throne by one of them, but finally he reconciles them in view of the mischief they can do in England. Another woodcut shows Cobbett, coffin on shoulder; and next we see the ship.

“E for Elizabeth doth stand And that’s a vessel’s name, That lately sailed from Yankey-Iand And to the Mersey came.”

Another hand identified in Notes and Queries, Feb. 29, 1868 as Thomas Rodd, Sr., (“John English” is the pseudonym) wrote an “Ode on the Bones of the Immortal Thomas Paine, newly transported from America to England by the no less immortal William Cobbett, Esq. Hic labor hic opus. Great Paine for little trumpery.” (4 to pp 8). This privately printed poem (now very rare) tries at points to be satirical, without much success; it is severe on Paine’s theological negations, but discloses a certain admiration for the arch-heretic. I quote a specimen:

“No Judge or Jury does he fear, Nor e’en the Attorney General’s frown Nor dread lthuriel with his spear Can knock this doughty Champion down.

‘Tis cowardice to strike the slain, ‘Tis cowardice to strike Tom Paine High high in dust the hero lies, And from his narrow box his face defies.

Who shall the great Arch-Flamen be Of this new god? Upon whose shrine Let brass and farthing candles shine; His pen once gain’d the victory,

And still victorious reigns, in spite Of all the Bishop could indite: None but the mighty hand of Law Against this daring Chief the quill could prosperous draw.”

Whether under more auspicious circumstances Cobbett could have received any enthusiasm for Paine can now be only a matter of conjecture. In 1820 George the Third, born in the same year with Paine, gave a fatal blow to all interest in his bones by dying on Paine’s birthday, January 29. Thenceforth popular feeling was entirely occupied with the sufferings of Queen Caroline and the affairs of George IV. Cobbett at once began his efforts to get into Parliament, and Paine’s bones were stored away and forgotten for many a long year. It appears, however, that he occasionally exhibited the bones. The Rev. Gerald Davies, of Charterhouse, wrote to the “Surrey Times”, Feb. 2, 1889, that he was told by the late James Wyatt, of Bedford, geologist, that in boyhood, being at Normandy Farm, Cobbett’s last residence, he said, “Is it true you keep the bones of Tom Paine, the infidel?” Cobbett replied, “What do you know about Tom Paine?” But he took the boy up stairs and showed him the bones. William Cobbett dies June 18, 1835, at Normandy Farm, near Guilford. His son J.P. Cobbett found himself unable to pay off his father’s debts and his own, and the effects were sold by Thomas Piggott at auction in the autumn of the same year, on the premises. This information was communicated to the “Surrey Times”, Jan. 19, 1889,b y D.M. Stevens, who adds:

“My informants, who were present at the sale, told me that a box was pointed out as containing the remains of Paine, and they believed that the box and its contents were described in the catalogue, and that some allusion being made to the fact, the auctioneer refused to bring the lot under the hammer. What eventually became of the box and its contents is an unsolved problem, and, notwithstanding my own efforts to solve it, had better to remain so. The whole subject is a painful one, and I have no doubt that Cobbett, of whom we Surrey men have abundant reason to be proud, often regretted that he had not left the noted Freethinker’s bones to remain in their original American resting-place.”

Gilbert Vale, who was in correspondence with English freethinkers, stated in “The Beacon”, Dec.27, 1845, “The bones fell into the hands of an elderly female, a nurse in Cobbett’s family, and by her given or sold to Lta King’s gardener.'” Lord King, who died two years before Cobbett, was a nobleman who held many opinions in common with Paine. His residence, Ockham, was not far from that of Cobbett.

I have a letter (autograph) written by Gilbert Vale, Aug. 20, 1860, in which he says: “Cobbett did take the bones of Paine to London: they are in the hands of the friends of Paine, who will one day put a monument up to him. I saw some of the parties in charge of them in 1848, and I have a pamphlet on the subject which I suppose I brought from England in that year.”

The pamphlet was: “A Brief History of the Remains of the late Thomas Paine, from the time of their disinterment in 1819 by the late William Cobbett M.P., down to the year 1846. London: J. Watson, 1847” pg.8.

I was acquainted with James Watson, and gave the address at his burial, in 1874. He was an able and exact man, and as he no doubt wrote the pamphlet himself, the following statements in it were undoubtedly those Watson received from Benjamin Tilly, – a tailor, and a factotum of Cobbett in London. According to the pamphlet Cobbett brought the coffin-plate, inscribed “Thomas Paine, died June 8, 1809, aged74 years.” (Both Watson and Tilly would certainly know that laine was- born January 29, 1737, and this pres6rvation of an error as to his age, probably due to Madame Bonneville who ordered the coffin, is a certificate of the genuineness of this plate, which must still be in existence.) Cobbett placed Paine’s remains for a short time “in the keeping of a well known friend of his in Hampshire” (Lord King?), but they were brought to London, and remained in Cobbett’s house, Bolt Court, until January 1833, when Tilly sent them to Normandy Farm. There they remained until Cobbett’s death (June 18, 1835). James Paul Cobbett (his son and executor) inscribed his own name in several places on the skull, and on the larger bones. This gentleman was charged with insolvency by one Jesse Oldfield, who had been his father’s shopman, and the litigation resulted in the appointment of a receiver for the Normandy Farm estate, George West, a neighboring farmer. In January 1836, when Cobbett’s effects were sold at his Farm, the auctioneer refused to offer Paine’s remains, and they were retained by the receiver to await the orders of the Lord Chancellor, who, on the subject being mentioned to him in Court, refused to recognize them as part of the estate, or to make any order. Georgel West’s receivership ended in 1839. After keeping Paine’s remains nine years, he ascertained that Tilly wished to carry out Cobbett’s intentions concerning them, and he therefore, saysW atson, conveyed them in March, 1844, to Mr. Tilly (13 Bedford Square, East, London) “by whom they will in all probability be kept, until a public funeral of them can be arranged.”

In “Notes & Queries”, January 25, 1868, a writer signing “A Native of Guilford” states that in the summer of 1849 he saw Paine’s bones in a box in the house of John Chennell, corn merchant in Guilford, who told him that they had been purchased at the Cobbett sale at Ash by someone ignorant of the contents of the chest. A writer in the “Surrey Times”, January 19, 1889, states that the same merchant, Chennell, possessed a porcelain jar, with parchment cover inscribed “The GreatP aine’s Bones”, but that “only a few bones were inside the jar”. To this the Surrey editor adds: A correspondent from the United States was assured that in 1849 they were lying in the cellar of Mr. Chennell’s house, and inquiries are being anxiously made in the States for any authentic information as to them..” This American correspondent had probably got his information from the “Native of Guilford” in “Notes & Queries”, which can hardly be correct. It does not harmonize with the porcelin jar story, and the latter is inexact; the sale was not at Ash, but on the Normandy Farm premises. Chennell may have kept the remains for some years for the receiver George West, but if any were there in 1849 it could only have been a few of the bones which, as will presently appear got separated from the rest. In that year they were seen in possession of Benjamin Tilly.

About 1860 Tillv died in the house of a Mr. Ginn, wood-merchant, Bethnal Green, and left with him a number of Cobbett’s MMS. and Paine relics, but apparently without careful information. According to a statement made to me by Mr. George Reynolds of 23 Stepney Green, his attention was called to these relics in 1879 by a daughter of Mr. Ginn, who was a member of the Baptist Church of which he (Reynolds) was then minister. He purchased the box of papers and relics which proved to be the MSS. Of Cobbett, and some of the brain and hair of Paine, of which Mr. Reynolds is still in possession. From these papers he ascertained that Tilly had owned Paine’s skeleton, and he at once inquired about it. Mrs. Ginn said that in cleaning the room after Tilly’s death she found a lot of bones in a large bag and sold them to a rag-and-bone collector. Mr. Reynolds says she did not appear to know they were human bones. Mr. Ginn, however, knew they were human, and said it was “a skeleton with the exception of the skull and leg or arm.”

On hearing this story of Mrs. Ginn it struck me that there was an accent of sophistication about it. The rag-and-bone collector must have known they were-human bones, if she did not. She may have expected to gain some credit with the Baptist pastor for having turned the remains of “Tom Paine” into more rubbish and dust. I have since discovered that her story is not true, and also, what Mr. Reynolds did not know, that the skull and right hand of Paine had indeed, before Tilly’s death, been removed and gone on a career of their own.

It is probable that Tilly never. knew that any of the bones had been removed from the box. Mr. Joseph Cowen (of the “Newcastle Chronicle”) tells me that about 1853-54 he was consulted by James Watson concerning the propriety of a public burial of Paine’s bones at Kensal Green. Watson said they were in the possession of a tailor who kept them in a box on which he sat while at work.. Mr. Cowen went with Watson to the shop of the tailor who however was not at home. On his next visit to London he again went to the place, but the tailor had removed without leaving any address. Mr. Cowen says it was in the neighborhood of Red Lion Square, and he does not remember he name; but it was no doubt Tilly, who might have been temporarily working in that neighborhood. Mr. Cowen never heard of the matter again, but he remembers asking James Paul Cobbett about the bones, and finding that he knew not what had become of them, and evidently did not wish to talk on the subject.

In December 1874 I inserted in the “National Reformer” an inquiry concerning Paine’s remains. I received the same week a note from Mr. James Dickens of Denham Vila, Guilford, who said that he had made inquiries there, but could only learn that at the Cobbett sale “there was no bidder” for the box and its contents. My inquiry, however, was taken up, and Mr. J. Darbyshire of Manchester, in a letter of September 18, 1875, to “The Secular Chronicle” (London) suggested that “Messrs. Bradlaugh, Watts, G.L. Holyoake, Foote, Mrs. Law and Mrs. Besant, and others should be requested to look after the remains of Thomas Paine and conduct a public funeral, and that a monument be erected over his grave.” Mr. Darbyshire was “sure that sufficient cash would be obtained for so good an object.” Therein he was no doubt right, but Paine’s remains were not discovered.

Meanwhile, however, a lecture I gave in London in 1876 on Thomas Paine attracted the attention of Edward Truelove, the veteran publisher rationalist literature, who wrote me (Dec. 2,1876) that in 1853 or 1854 the Rev. Robert Ainslie came into his shop in the Strand, and observing Paine’s Works “volunteered the very startling information that he, the Rev. Robert Ainslie – of all men! – had in his possession the skull and right hand of Thomas Paine, but did not say how he came by them, evading my question.”

Mr. Ainslie was not aware that Mr. Truelove knew his name, but the bookseller recognized him as the Secretary of the London City Mission, under whose auspices many years before a course of lectures had been given in Eagle Street Chapel against “Infidel Socialism”. Mr. Ainslie gave one of the lectures, and Mr. Truelove was naturally startled that any remains of Paine should have fallen into such orthodox hands. However, he did not mention to Mr. Ainslie that he recognized him. But on a later occasion, when the minister again entered his shop (removed to Holborn) he asked him what had become of Paine’s bones, and his question was not answered.

Mr. Ainslie probably became the owner of Paine’s skull and right hand before George West brought the box to Benjamin Tilly. His daughter Margaretta (first wife of the late Sir Russell Reynolds) having received an inquiry of mine addressed to her father (1877) who died before it arrived, answered:

“Mr. Thomas Paine’s bones were in our possession. I remember them as a child, but I believe they were lost in the various movings which my father had some years ago. I can find no trace of them, but if I do by more inquiries.”

I heard nothing more from Mrs. Russell Reynolds, and she died in 1880. The late Sir Russell Reynolds had, as he lately wrote me, “an obscure recollection of having seen the bones of a hand a great many years ago.” As Margaretta Ainslie was married in 1852, her childhood recollections probably extended into the years preceding 1844, when Watson says the bones were brought to London. This marriage took place at Fromer House, Bromley, Kent, where Mr. Ainslie resided at the time, and it is not Improbable that his near neighbor, Charles Darwin, inspected the skull of his predecessor in heresy. But it is a more picturesque reflection that eventualities should have brought Paine’s skull back to the vicinity of his favourite haunt, -the so-called “Tom Paine Tree”, an ancient oak in the grounds of the old Bishop’s Palace.

As this tree has not, I believe, been mentioned in any book, it may interest the reader to know that there is such a tree, and that it is said by long tradition to be the favourite resort of Paine while writing the “Age of Reason”. I recently visited the tree, in company of Mr. Coles Childs, present owner of Bromley Palace. The trunk, about 25 feet in girth at the ground, is entirely hollow, but the foliage is ample, and there is hardly a dead branch. As a matter of history Paine did pass some time in Bromley, and a very intelligent watchmaker there, Mr. How, told me that he remembers his aged father pointing out the rather handsome residence, “Church Cottage”, as that in which Paine resided. There is no evidence that Paine wrote any part of the “Age of Reason” at Bromley, but it is not improbable. In my historical introduction to the “Age of Reason”, just published, I have shown that parts were written long before its publication; the subject was always near his heart, and he was fond of discussing it with his neighbors. In the early months of 1792 Paine was residing with his publisher, Clio Rickman, at 7 Upper Marylebone Street (still a bookbinding with the old bookshelves remaining), where the swarming of radicals left too little leisure for writing. “Mr. Paine goes out of town tomorrow to compose what I call Burke’s funeral sermon”, says John Hall in his diary, April 20,1792. This was at Bromley, where, on May l4, he heard of the summons of the publisher of “Rights of Man”, and hastened to London, and claimed the right to stand in the publisher’s place. He then doubtless resumed work at Bromley, and one may indulge the picturesque legend that there in “Church Cottage”, which was ecclesiastical property, and beneath the giant oak on the bishop’s grounds, this heresiarch worked on the book that was to shake temples. From the “Tom Paine Tree” one may almost see Down homestead, where Darwin still more shook the temples, though the most venerable of them became his monument.

The Rev. Robert Ainslie had a brother who was an eminent veterinary surgeon, and in his professional or some other capacity was, I am told, connected with the estate of Lord King at Ockham, not far from Cobbett’s place. It was through him that the Rev. Robert Ainslie heard of Paine’s bones. His son. Mr. Oliver Ainslie, tells me that the remains were then in the rooms of the auctioneer Richards( 43 Rathbone Place) “for sale”, and that the skull and right hand were there purchased by his father. It is thus clear that all of the facts were not known to Tilly and Watson. In Watson’s pamphlet it is stated that the bones were brought up to London by George West and given to Tilly, at 13 Bedford Square East. But Benjamin Tilly’s name does not appear at that place in the directories of the time; indeed it does not appear at all until 1852. It seems possible that the tailor had no such fixed residence as would carry as his name into the directory, and that he confided the box of bones to the auctioneer Richards until he had a house of his own. If so Richards, or some subordinate, may have abstracted th e skull and hand and sold them to Mr. Ainslie, Tilly remaining ignorant of the trespass. It is possible, however, that the skull and hand had been sold by West the receiver to Chennell of Guilford before the remains were brought to Tilly, who did not examine them. Mr. Edward Smith tells me that he “interviewed” the son of Chennell in 1877, and heard that Paine’s bones had been sold, and brought 7s 6d. Mr. Truelove says that when he told Watson that Ainslie had the skull he smiled in credulously, yet amid all the tangle of conjectures the certainties are that Tilly had the skeleton without the skull and right hand, a portion of the brain and several pieces of hair, and that Ainslie possessed the cranium and right hand.

Mr. Oliver Ainslie remarked that the smallness and delicacy of Paine’s hand were such that the late Professor John Marshall, of the Royal College of Surgeons, at first thought it the hand of a female. “The head was also small for a man, and of the Celtic type I should say, and somewhat conical in shape, and with more cerebellum than frontal development.” ‘Some little time after his father’s death the skull and hand were brought from 7l Mornington Road, where the Rev. Robert Ainslie had resided, to Mr. Oliver Ainslie’s house 48 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, whence they were taken away by a Mr. Penny, to whom had been confided some arrangements of the room containing them for a new tenant. Mr. Oliver Ainslie became interested in the remains only when too late to save them, and has not been able to find Mr. Penny, nor does he know his full name. He fears that Penny may have disposed of the skull to one of the wastepaper dealers nearby. But this appears to me improbable. Every physician must possess a skull, which is worth more than a wastepaper dealer would pay. This skull of Paine also had the name of J.P. Cobbett written, or perhaps scratched, on it. If an obvious remark may be forgiven, Mr. Penny would hardly be so pound foolish as to dispose of a skull so inscribed as mere rubbish, and it is probable that Paine’s skull is now in some doctor’s office or craniological collection.

The Rev. Robert Ainslie, whom I met at Brighton in 1863, was a man of ability, and my conjecture would be that his purchase of Paine’s skull may have been due to an interest in phrenology, were it not that he bought the hand also. Mr. George Jacob H lyoake tells me that he spoke to Mr. Ainslie about these bones, but that the minister did not wish his name publicly connected with them at the time. There were sufficient reasons for this, but they have long since passed away.

Mr. Ainslie had been, it will be remembered, an official member of the City Mission, which consists of men belonging to different denominations, but has a reputation of being very strict about their orthodoxy. Mr. Ainslie’s orthodoxy was assailed by some of his fellow-labourers in the City Mission, and though he warmly resented this at the time it would appear that his assailants saw the tendencies of some of his views more clearly than himself, for some years after the controversy he became (1860) minister of a liberal chapel at Brighton, where he remained until 1870. Mr. Ainslie had come into possession of Paine’s skull some years before his orthodoxy was called in question, and the hue and cry might have been disagreeably renewed had it reached the public that while Secretary of the City Mission he had the bones of the terrible “Tom Paine” in his house.

It appears certain that when he purchased the skull and hand, Mr. Ainslie was quite unconscious of any heretical symptoms. If it were admissible for Painites to believe in the potency of saintly relics they might point to the fact that Paine’s skull fell into the hands of an orthodox member of the City Mission, and Paine’s brain into those of an orthodox Baptist Minister (Rev. George Reynolds), and that both of these ministers subsequently became unorthodox. And indeed it seems not improbable that these relics may have contributed something to the result, by exciting in the two divines some curiosity to know what thoughts had played through the lamp whose fragments had come into their possession. And it is difficult for one who reads the “Age of Reason” to remain precisely the simple believer he was before.

That Paine’s skull is still somewhere in London is highly probable, and were any found with the name “Cobbett” on it its genuineness could be easily proved by another word or two on it which for the present I reserve. As to the other remains of Paine’s skeleton they were not destroyed, as Mrs. Ginn’s story might imply, for they were seen in by the Rev. Alexander Gordon, now a Unitarian tutor at Manchester, in 1873, and heard of in 1876. Although that gentleman gives no further particulars, the correspondence which has passed between us leaves no doubt on my mind that he was led by his respect for Paine (despite divergences from that author’s religion) to secure for the remains quiet burial, – perhaps near his parents at Thetford. I find especial satisfaction in this belief since reading in the “New York World” (January 26,1896) the following statement:

“Out in the country, somewhere back of New Rochelle, in a lonesome spot, there is a mound with a monument raised over it, and an inscription to the effect that the remains of Thomas Paine lie beneath that stone. If this is not true a great many worthy people are wasting their indignation, for the majority of those who pass the monument and know to whom it is erected, throw stones at it. Thus do Christians show their contempt for those whose opinions do not agree with theirs.”

This stone-throwing ceased, I believe, some years ago; the pious anti-Painites may have found that they were really adding to the author’s cairn by attributing such importance to his writings long after those of his opponents were forgotten.

Of the remains of Thomas Paine exhumed by Cobbett there are now traceable a portion of his brain and two locks of his hair. One of the latter was presented to me by Mr. Edward Smith, biographer of Cobbett. Paine’s hair never became grey. The hair before me (on the old paper wrapping of which is written in Tilly’s hand “Mr. Paine’s Hair”) is soft and dark, with a reddish tinge. The portion of Paine’s brain owned by Mr. George Reynolds is about the size of one’s fist, and quite hard. It is under glass and beside it is a note in Tilly’s writing:

“On Tuesday January 7th 1833 I went to 11 Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and there with Mr. Entrell and Mr. Dean, I saw, at the house of Mr. Cobbett, the remains of Mr. Thomas Paine, when I procured some of his hair, and from his skull I took a portion of his brain, which had become hard, and which is almost perfectly black. – B. Tilly”

There are other personal relics of Paine. During the American revolution Paine wrote the fifth number of his “Crisis” at the house of the Hon. William Henry at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his spectacles and shoe-buckles were left there. These were presented by a grand-daughter of Mr. Henry to the National Museum at Washington, where I examined them. The spectacles (silver) have small glasses of extraordinary power. Paine’s arm-chair and his brass and irons are in the possession of Albert Badeau at New Rochelle. It is said that a walking cane of his exists but I cannot discover it. Mr. G.J. Holyoake has a copy of Paine’s portrait (Sharp’s engraving of Romney’s picture) with the author’s presentation to Rickman on it. Claire J. Grece, of Redhill, possesses Paine’s snuff-box presented to his uncle, Daniel Constable, in 1807, by Paine. Edward Truelove possesses the writing-table used by Paine while in Rickman’s house in 1792. Alfred Hammond, of Lewes, possesses imprints of his (portrait) seal while an exciseman in that town, Louis Breeze, Stratford-by-Bow, has a piece of wood from the birthhouse of Paine, at Thetford, now destroyed. Of course there are many autograph letters of Paine, but no manuscript of anything he ever wrote for publication has been preserved.

A considerable number of these relics were among the five hundred articles shown at the Paine Exhibition in South Place Chapel, openedD ecember 2 , 1895.There were also first editions of his works, and many polemical caricatures, books, and pamphlets called forth by these works; there were portraits of famous men – American, English, French – whose swords were unsheathed to maintain or assail the republic of Paine’s vision, with its rainbow flag; but most impressive of all was the darkened bit of brain whence radiated the inner light of that miraculous Thetford Quaker.

If we pass from personal relics to relics of personality, those of Paine are innumerable; and among these the most important are the legends and fictions told concerning him by enemies, unconscious that their romances were really tributes to his unique influence. Nothing concerning Paine seems to have been too marvelous for acceptance, in the past, and even in our own time one occasionally meets with inventions suggesting a certain praeternaturalism in his character. Thus on September 21, 1895,a London journal, “Answers”, gravely published as a genuine autograph letter of Paine’s, in the possession of one of its Dublin readers, the following, said to be addressed to a linendraper at Chelmsford:

“Chapter Coffee House

London, May 8th, 1793

“Sir, – in perusing the Chelmsford paper I see you are a vendor of Fleecy Hosiery, and as you are a man after my own heart, a Leveller and a Talker of Treason, please to send six pair of the above Fleecy Hosierie to me at Chapter, and I will send you the money. Yours, Tom Paine.”

I wrote to the editor asking to be put into communication with the owner of this letter signed “Tom(!) Paine”, and written more than seven months after Paine had left England forever, but he could not do so -of course.

I must venture to repeat here, though it is mentioned in my edition of the “Age of Reason”, a legend told me by Mr. Van der Weyde, the eminent London photographer, who remembers when a boy a sermon in which the preacher said that Tom Paine was so wicked that he could not be buried. The earth would not hold him. His bones were placed in a box and carried about from one place to another, until at last they came into the hands of a button-maker, and now his bones are traveling about the world in the form of buttons! This variant of the Wandering Jew legend recalls to me a verse which William Allingham added with pen to his admirable poem “The Touchstone” in a volume in my possession. The original poem, it will be remembered, closes with burning the formidable man’s touchstone, and strewing the ashes on the breeze, little guessing that each grain of these `conveyed the perfect charm.’ The manuscript addition is:

“North, South, in the rings and amulets, Throughout the crowded world ’tis borne, Which, as a fashion long outworn, Its ancient mind forgets.”

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Mariam Touba

Slipped into the newspaper in 1827 was an “Anecdote of Thomas Paine.” As such stories go, it was far from the worst, but it was meant to be denigrating. A visitor stops in to see the elderly Paine while he is denouncing the Bible among his cohorts and interrupts with questions of his own, and Paine, supposedly bested in argument, leaves the room without so much as a word. This little vignette was repeated often and was typical and mild fare for the time, especially as the newspaper was co-edited by a Presbyterian minister. The paper was not otherwise ordinary, as Freedom’s Journal was the first newspaper in the United States to be issued by and for African-Americans and, significantly, was begun in New York City in the year that slavery was to be finally abolished in the Empire State. This, however, was how the editors chose to depict Thomas Paine, an early and consistent opponent of black slavery in all forms.

The pattern can be seen even more starkly elsewhere in much of the antislavery press in the decades before the Civil War. A Massachusetts paper representing the distinctly abolitionist Liberty Party had this to say of Thomas Paine in 1845:

He was an open blasphemer and a contemner of God and all things sacred. He was a shameless debauchee, and a most loathsome, degraded sot. He trampled upon the decencies of civilized society, and was a slave to the vilest and most sensual of the animal appetites and passions. He was also void of moral honesty: for, on his dying bed, he called, in the bitterness of his soul, upon Jesus Christ, whom, during his life, he had affected to despise and had uniformly ridiculed and blasphemed.

And so, Thomas Paine’s strong antislavery stand was hardly appreciated and often unknown to those “in the trenches,” the 19^th century abolitionists who were actually fighting the peculiar institution in antebellum America.

Reasons for this ignorance can easily be found: For one, scholars contend that revolutionary era abolitionism had little hold over this new generation of mostly New England reformers. Except for his 1804 “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” Paine’s antislavery publications were contained in unsigned newspaper articles and were entirely unknown before being brought to light by his dedicated biographer Moncure Conway-an abolitionist in his own right-only late in the 19^th century, when the fight against North American slavery was over. Paine’s religious writings made him unpalatable to the churched, many of whom provided the energy for the abolitionist and reform movements of the first half of the 19^th century. Thus, the very Northern, Christian-based publications that printed arguments against slavery ran them virtually side-by-side with denigrating stories about the “infidel” Thomas Paine.

The exceptions to this pattern were rare and noteworthy, and one is stunned by Wendell Phillips lecturing the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1858 where he goes so far as to say that Thomas Paine and the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards – “their names found side by side in the anti-slavery societies of the revolutionary periods”-would “embrace” as they mount this antislavery rampart together (although he does not make the distinction, Phillips is undoubtedly referring to Jonathan Edwards, Junior, more of Paine’s contemporary). Nonetheless, Phillips is very much the exception both in being aware of Paine’s antislavery commitment and daring to make this bold link with Edwards. Wendell Phillips would move farther away from conventional Christianity in the post-Civil War period, and this pattern can be found in other abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and, of course, Moncure Conway. As Harvey Kaye documents, the appreciation of these longtime radicals for Paine augments with their post-Christian evolution, but it is largely a post-War phenomenon. Phillips stands out as the only prominent leader who links Paine to the cause at hand.

There was, however, something additional that added fuel to this abolitionist ignorance about Thomas Paine. Turning up in the abolitionist press in 1849 was “Mr. Rushton’s Letter to Thomas Paine.” “Mr. Rushton” was Edward Rushton, a British poet and early abolitionist with an interesting life story: Like John Newton, he found himself working on an 18^th-century slave ship, but, unlike Newton, young Rushton seems to have been forced there as part of his apprenticeship in a Liverpool shipping company. Appalled by what he witnessed, Rushton threatened mutiny; later, he went himself and ministered to the sick among the shackled slave cargo. The contagion on this particular ship was one that affected the eyes, and Rushton, at age 19, was blinded as a result of his compassion. He spent the rest of his years advocating for the blind and the enslaved. Unlike his contemporary, William Wilberforce, who approached antislavery from the Tory side, Rushton was a radical, a Paineite himself, and his enthusiasm for the American revolutionary cause led him to address letters to his heroes George Washington and Thomas Paine pleading with them to use their influence against slavery. In recounting Rushton’s admirable life and writings, it is common to lump the two letters together, but they differed in tone and circumstance. The letter to Washington was intemperate and written just at the close of Washington’s second term as President. Washington was smarting from criticism (not least by Thomas Paine) and returned Rushton’s missive unopened. Feeling rebuffed, Rushton then printed his communication as an angry pamphlet in 1797. The letter to Paine was written after Paine had returned from Europe to live in New York and probably dates from 1804 or 1805. It is admiring in tone and, as it appears with some later editorial commentary, suggests that Rushton was aware of Paine’s comment on Rushton’s native Liverpool, wondering why God Almighty did not blast it with a thunderbolt given its prominent role in the slave trade (Paine, it be might recalled, wrote something similar to Thomas Jefferson). In an addendum Rushton admits that “since his [Paine’s] receipt of this, he has frequently sent me his verbal respects, but will not commit himself to paper on the subject.” Nonetheless, Rushton’s original letter, later published in the main antislavery literature of mid-century America, has this unfortunate misstatement: “As the clear and energetic champion for broad and general liberty, you have not a superior in the annals of mankind; yet through the whole of your writings I do not recollect a single passage that is particularly pointed against the slavery of the negroes.”   

How did, what was meant to be a private letter from Rushton to Paine in about 1805, find its way into the antislavery newspapers of 1849? We can trace that with some probable accuracy as it appeared just after Paine’s death in the Belfast Monthly Magazine of December 1809. Nearly 40 years later, in 1848, the Massachusetts abolitionist, Anne Warren Weston was helping to compile a gift annual called the Liberty Bell. Gift annuals, as their name implies, were attractive books issued each year and stocked with poems, illustrations, and light literature, and marketed as Christmas or New Year’s presents. With the Liberty Bell, however, the American Anti-Slavery Society was adopting this popular medium for the cause, and Weston, always desperate for more material, implored her contact in Dublin, activist Richard Davis Webb, for more antislavery writings. Webb complied in part by sending the published letter of Rushton’s, most likely taken from the Irish magazine of 1809. From the Liberty Bell, the Rushton letter rather naturally found its way into both William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, both additional organs of the American Anti-Slavery Society, papers with a relatively small circulation but deeply influential with activists.

The well-meaning Rushton unwittingly did Paine a lasting disservice then, but his basic question is a reasonable one: Why did Paine oppose slavery and yet devote so little of his writings to the injustice of slavery?

In addressing this, we should first be aware that we may not have access to all of Paine’s writings: Most of his unpublished papers burned, and he was not in the habit of signing everything he had printed. Approaching a subject such as antislavery, with adherents on both sides of the ramparts of Federalist and Republican in the United States, Tory and Whig in England, Girondist and Jacobin in France, may have caused Paine to step lightly or work anonymously. One notes that Henry Redhead Yorke, upon visiting Paine in Paris in 1802, observed that Paine was isolated and held in contempt, and he attributed it to Paine’s support of the black Haitians against the French general Charles LeClerc. These Paris writings have not surfaced and beg the question, Are there fugitive writings by Paine that were translated into the French newspapers?

One of Paine’s biographers, David Freeman Hawke, sees a partial answer to Paine’s seeming reticence on slavery in his letter from Paris to Benjamin Rush in 1790, “I despair of seeing an Abolition of the infernal traffic in Negroes-we must push that matter further on your Side the water [sic]-I wish that a few well instructed Negroes could be sent among their Brethern [sic] in Bondage, for until they are enabled to take their own part nothing will be done.” On the one hand, Hawke is dismissive of Paine’s suggestion that the cause needed the input of the African victims themselves. But to contemporary ears, Paine’s prescription, far from passing the buck, sounds acutely modern, and one that black activists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth would embrace.

Hawke goes on about Paine, “He was not a joiner; rather, he was something of a prima donna, disinclined to share credit when honors were being handed out. No reform movement that required group action ever attracted his interest.” Paine did refrain from joining clubs in the flurry of the French Revolution and seems not to have been a conventional committee man, but Hawke overreaches when suggesting that Paine was not likely to work as a simple foot soldier in a cause. Paine not only wrote on behalf of groups he supported, but did so anonymously: In England, he penned John Horne Tooke’s speech for the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty, he wrote the manifesto for the Société Républicaine in the immediate aftermath of the Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes; during the American Revolution he offered to go on a dangerous mission incognito to England to write in support of the American cause; some have suggested, and there is a bit of evidence for this, that Paine may have contributed in perfect anonymity to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Hawke does quote Paine’s most succinct statement on the subject: The question was put to Paine by the English physician John Walker, “How it was to be accounted for, that he had not taken up the pen to advocate the cause of blacks,” and where Paine’s response was recalled by Walker as, “an unfitter person for such a work could hardly be found. The cause would have suffered in my hands. I could not have treated it with any chance of success; for I could never think of their condition but with feelings of indignation.”

Paine’s explanation requires a certain amount of self-awareness about himself and his role as a writer. Those who tend to view Paine as a sort of “natural talent,” who wrote easily and without hesitation on what he believed, may be cynical about this reason, but Paine does more than once write about the need to be “always the master of one’s temper in writing,” and how a writer’s argument is lost when his judgment is “disordered by an intemperate irritation of the passions.” Even Hawke, one of the more skeptical of Paine’s modern biographers, concludes, this “excuse from one known for his impassioned writing sounds flimsy, but given his literary credo-warm passions must always be combined with a cool temper-it may have been the truth.” And, indeed, we may have to leave it at that.

Just about the time Rushton was chiding him for his inaction, Paine expressed once more his feelings about slavery. This is found tucked away in a greeting right here in the Thomas Paine National Historical Association/Iona Collection, in an unpublished letter, written from New Rochelle to his good friend John Fellows on April 18, 1805. Paine offers news about the farm, gives instructions about the Bonneville boys, and provides specifications for wallpapering the cottage. And then he tells Fellows, “And also call on Counsellor Emmet with my congratulations on his eminent success in the Affrican [sic] Affair.” What is the African Affair?

Counselor Emmet is Thomas Addis Emmet, the Irish émigré lawyer whose sojourn was not so different from other prominent participants in the failed Irish uprisings of the 1790s. It would involve years of imprisonment, followed by exile to the Continent (where Emmet spent time in Paris and got to know Paine’s good friend Nicolas de Bonneville) before Emmet could emigrate to the United States in late 1804. He was persuaded to remain in New York and practice law, and since there was a vacancy in the local bar-given that a prominent lawyer, Alexander Hamilton, had met an untimely death that summer-New York’s Republican leaders were willing to expedite the process for Emmet’s entry into the profession. Some Federalists resisted, and the matter became just became more fodder for partisan controversy. The Republicans prevailed, and Emmet was allowed to argue before the New York bar in 1805. And his 19^th century biographer describes

Very soon after Mr. Emmet appeared at our bar, he was employed in a case peculiarly well calculated for the display of his extraordinary powers. Several slaves had escaped from a neighbouring state and found a refuge here. Their masters seized them, and the rights of these masters became a matter of controversy. Mr. Emmet, I have been informed, was retained by the society of friends…and of course espoused the cause of the slaves. His effort is said to have been overwhelming. The novelty of his manner, the enthusiasm which he exhibited, his broad Irish accent, his pathos and violence of gesture, created a variety of sensations in the audience.

Records of this case have not been found, but the tradition is repeated even into this decade when writing of Emmet. The diligent records of a current researcher into slavery cases in the Early Republic reveal, however, that this most likely was not a fugitive slave case, but rather the major prosecution of a slave trader. Emmet assisted, on behalf of the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves, in seeing to it that one Philip M. Topham was brought to justice in federal court on April 1, 1805. The Manumission Society was one place where prominent Federalists and Republicans worked together in this highly partisan age, and Emmet may have found it a natural entry to the polarized legal community. The case did not receive newspaper publicity, but Paine could have heard of it from his friend Walter Morton, serving as the Manumission Society’s secretary. Emmet and Morton were two of Paine’s most trusted friends; indeed he would choose them as co-executors of his will. Looking further from this event, one learns that Emmet goes on to become counsel for the Manumission Society. In addition to clarifying a long-obscured aspect of Thomas Addis Emmet’s biography, the episode illustrates how deeply Thomas Paine’s closest friends were engaged in the antislavery struggle, demonstrates Paine’s own interest in the matter, and suggests that there is indeed more to be discovered in the collection here at Iona.

Notes

Freedom’s Journal (New York), March 30, 1827. The paper was edited by the Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish and by John Russwurm.

From the Worcester County Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), as reprinted in the Liberator (Boston), December 5, 1845. Some of the vehemence is a reflection of the rivalry between the Liberty Party and the American Anti-Slavery Society (or Garrisonians). This quotation was, in fact, a direct response to William Lloyd Garrison’s paper The Liberator, but the statements about Paine were believed to be true, and neither mentions Paine’s firm opposition to slavery. Similarly, some of the attacks on Paine in moderate Christian antislavery publications were ultimately directed toward doctrinaire Christian abolitionism that had begun to be seen as “infidel” See, for example, “Thomas Paine,” New York Evangelist, January 31, 1850, p. 19.

James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) p. 43.

“‘Speech of Wendell Phillips,’ New York Anti-Slavery Society: Phonographically reported for the Liberator by Mr. Yerrinton” Liberator, May 28, 1858. Phillips was arguing against letting sectarian considerations weaken the abolitionist movement, demonstrating that he had already moved toward making the antislavery cause paramount over theology.

Even the most historically minded abolitionist would have known little of Paine’s antislavery opinions: Phillips’s awareness that Paine joined an antislavery society may have been because his name appears in the published history of the Pennsylvania Society, Edward Needles, An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1848), p. 29. This is when Paine was elected to join the Society as it was reconstituted after the war in 1787. Not surprisingly, he comes with an asterisk and this note:

Perhaps it might be proper to remark, that the latter individual, who subsequently acquired an unenviable notoriety as an infidel writer, was only known at this time as a patriot and lover of equal rights to all men, his peculiar principles in regard to theology not having been publicly known, as they were subsequently developed during his residence in France, where, in the time of the Revolution, he made the public avowal of his sentiments by the publication of his most obnoxious work, “The Age of Reason.”

Benjamin Rush’s recollection that he was drawn to Paine by his early antislavery essay had been published in James Cheetham’s otherwise hostile biography of 1809, but the specific discovery that Paine wrote the essay, “African Slavery in America” in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser (postscript) March 8, 1775, was an outgrowth of Conway’s research in the late 1880s or early 1890s; Conway clearly just followed the lead in Rush’s reference to [William]”Bradford’s paper” by paging through the newspaper in an archive until he hit upon an essay that obviously fit that description (See “Thomas Paine and Charles Bradlaugh,” The Open Court, March 5, 1891). Some recent scholars, such as Alfred Owen Aldridge and Eric Foner, thought Conway’s evidence was unpersuasive, given that Rush’s memory proved to be faulty, Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware, 1984) pp. 289-290; Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Library of America, 1995) p. 835; this is more strongly stated in James V. Lynch, “The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Thomas Paine and Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 123, no. 3 (July 1999) pp. 177-199. Similarly, Paine’s authorship of “A Serious Thought,” signed Humanus, in the Pennsylvania Journal of October 18, 1775 was also only brought to light by Conway who credited a Joseph N. Moreau with this unpublished attribution (Moncure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine [New York: G. P. Putnam, 1892] vol. 1, p. 59). Conway also claimed to be the first to include “The Forester’s Letters” of 1776 (No. 3 contains Paine’s footnote: “Forget not the hapless African.”) among Paine’s published works. Thus it may be that Paine’s letter of 1804, “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” that does appear in earlier versions of Paine’s collected writings, was his only published antislavery work that was available to mid-19^th century abolitionists.

Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005) p. 150. Reasons for this departure from Christianity may have had its roots in James Brewer Stewart’s assertion about the abolitionists at the height of their struggle, “These spiritually restless young men and women had now invented a religion of their own, a sanctified community which filled the enormous void created when they had rejected orthodox revivalism and which would sustain them during the struggles that lay ahead,” Stewart, Holy Warriors, pp. 57-58; see also this “antislavery theological innovation” described in detail in Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 44-51. For many, there was no turning back to orthodox Christianity.

Rushton’s name may sound familiar to dedicated Paineites because his son, Edward, Jr., figures in the long saga of William Cobbett and Paine’s remains, Paul Collins, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 273-274.

Rushton’s Expostulatory Letter to Washington, of Mount Vernon, in Virginia, on his Continuing to be a Proprietor of Slaves (Liverpool, 1797) may have had its greatest impact in New York City, where it was reprinted in the Republican newspaper the Time Piece on May 26, 1797, and where it touched off a debate, much of it in poetic form. See David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006) pp. 167-169.

Paine shared similar commentary about Liverpool when writing to Thomas Jefferson at about the same time: “Had I the command of the elements I would blast Liverpool with fire and brimstone. It is the Sodom and Gomorrah of brutality.” Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1805 in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. by Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945) vol. 2, p. 1462 (Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 350).

Richard Davis Webb to Anne Warren Weston, October 20, 1848, Antislavery Collection, Boston Public Library, HYPERLINK “https://www.archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb43” \t “_blank” https://www.archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb43; Ralph Thompson, “The Liberty Bell and Other Anti-Slavery Gift Books,” New England Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 (March 1934) pp. 154-168.

Liberator, February 23, 1849; National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 14, 1849; the latter may have come directly from Richard Davis Webb since he was a regular correspondent for the paper.

Henry Redhead Yorke, Letters from France, in 1802 (Printed for H.D. Symonds by Bye and Law, 1804) vol. 2, p. 338.

Thomas Paine to Benjamin Rush, Paris, March 16, 1790, reprinted in The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions [vol. 1, no. 1], 1943, p. 20-22.

David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) p. 150.

Mariam Touba, “Thomas Paine’s Offhand Remark,” Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011) HYPERLINK “https://www.thomas-paine-friends.org/touba-mariam_thomas-paines-offhand-remark-2011.html” https://www.thomas-paine-friends.org/touba-mariam_thomas-paines-offhand-remark-2011.html. For Paine and clubs, see Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 46

John Epps, The Life of John Walker, M.D. (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1831) pp. 140-41.

“Thomas Paine to the Citizens of the United States, Letter IV” [December 3, 1802] in Foner, Complete Writings, vol. 2, p. 926 (Conway, Writings, III, 402); Letter to Abbé Raynal in Foner, Complete Writings, p. 214 (Conway, Writings, II, 70). These writings are identified and discussed in Harry Hayden Clark, “Thomas Paine’s Theories of Rhetoric,”  Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, vol. XXVIII (1933) pp. [307]-339. Clark puts great emphasis on Paine’s recognition of the need for self-discipline in writing, a legacy, he believes of 18^th century deists who believed in living in harmony with the laws of nature, pp. 330-334.

Hawke, p. 37, also citing Clark.

Thomas Addis Emmet, Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet with their Ancestors and Immediate Family (New York: Emmet Press, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 395, 406.

Charles Glidden Haines, Memoir of Thomas Addis Emmet (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1829) pp. 87-88.

Emmet’s law firm, Emmet, Marvin & Martin, LLP included this fact in their bicentennial publication in (naturally) 2005:

HYPERLINK “https://www.emmetmarvin.com/pdf/emmetMarvin.pdf” \t “_blank” https://www.emmetmarvin.com/pdf/emmetMarvin.pdf ; Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, edited by Roger K. Newman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 187.

New York Manumission Society Records, 1785-1849, vol. 7, p. 278, New-York Historical Society. The minutes suggest that the case was heard on April 1 in the Second Circuit court with Justice William Paterson hearing the case. Emmet and his fellow counsel were commended by the society for their “very zealous able ingenious management of this complicated and severely contested suit.” I am very much indebted to Sarah Levine-Gronningsater for finding this case and adding further insight into the role the Manumission Society may have played in Emmet’s legal career. Emmet‘s admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar preceded his clearing his final hurdle to be admitted to the New York Bar, Emmet, Memoir, vol. 1 p. 406. William Paterson’s presence can merely be inferred from John E. O’Connor, William Paterson, Lawyer and Statesman, 1745-1806 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1979) p. 276; William Paterson to Euphemia Paterson, New York, April 1, 1805, Folder 14, William Paterson Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. Topham’s case appears to have dragged on in the courts, and President Jefferson would pardon Topham in 1808. The pardon was due to his inability to pay the $16,000 fine, and was apparently approved by the Manumission Society, Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, Second Term, 1805-1809 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974) p. 547, n. 19.

All that could be gleaned from the newspapers is: “The Circuit Court of the United States, was opened yesterday morning at the City Hall. An elegant address was delivered to the grand jury by the hon judge Patterson [sic],” Morning Chronicle [New York], April 2, 1805.”

“Report of Dr. Macneven in relation to Mr. Emmet’s Monument, “in Emmet Monument (New York: Printed for the subscribers, 1833) p. 1.

Mariam Touba

October 2012

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A Canadian who grew up outside Toronto, I first heard of Thomas Paine very briefly in high school when my Canadian history classes spent as little time as possible on the American Revolution. That was more about the Loyalist expulsion to Canada than the achievement of American independence. 

My next encounter with Paine came about 20 years ago when I applied for my current job as a professor of English at the university in New Rochelle. I had earned my Ph.D. in 18th-century literature, so I was applying for the 18th-century literature job at a university in New Rochelle. I noticed the Thomas Paine Cottage and museum were fairly close to campus. In my job interview, I asked about the relationship between the Paine sites and school. They replied that there was no relationship, and I noted to myself that if I got the job, I would like to try to build that relationship. 

Fast forward to 2009 and the first stirrings for transferring archival materials from the TPHA Memorial Building to the university library. I met Gary Berton then. His knowledge and passion about Paine was contagious. We helped start the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona and we organized in 2012 the first International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies. 

This was a real watershed for me. In so many ways, it launched me fully into my Thomas Paine research. That conference allowed me to edit New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies (Palgrave, 2016), the collection of essays arising from that conference. 

At that 2012 conference, over lunches and coffee, we began to work and plan for what’s become Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton, 2026), the six-volume scholarly edition of Paine’s works and correspondence, which will definitively re-write the conventional early-American narratives about Paine. Historians have so much wrong, and we are about to correct the record, which is exactly the original goal of the TPHA. 

I will never forget the day after the conference when I looked at the table of contents in Philip Foner’s two-volume edition of Paine’s works. One section listed Paine’s “songs and poems,” and I knew I had a unique connection to Paine. My academic specialty is poetry, so I decided to write a book on Paine and his poetry, which I’ve done, “The Field of Imagination: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry” (Virginia, 2019). 

Paine used poetry throughout his life — in print and manuscripts — to explore political ideology as well as human feelings. That’s what makes Paine so interesting, compelling and fascinating to me. 

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A response to Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho 

Growing up in New Rochelle, I’ve always been intrigued by Thomas Paine.  As a young student in New Rochelle’s Catholic schools, I enjoyed educational class trips to the Thomas Paine Cottage. These trips reinforced what we were being taught in school that Thomas Paine’s writing of Common Sense  played an important role in the American revolution.   

As I grew older, I wondered why this national historical site did not seem very popular. The cottage grounds were usually empty, and the museum building felt off limits, unlike my childhood tours. I’d recall childhood play on the Paine property beside the stream and lake. I’d ponder why this national historical site wasn’t getting the attention Paine deserved. 

In recent years, I’m delighted to see public interest in Thomas Paine and his contributions to America’s founding is gaining traction.  

I’m also delighted with the academic presentations by the Paine Association, such as the talk by Dr. Carvalho, which stimulated this essay. 

When I heard Carvalho’s ideas, my first impression was that Thomas Paine’s writings remain as pertinent today as in the revolutionary era. Most assuredly, the administration in the White House now would have had Paine arrested for his writings as a foreigner. It seems we have come full circle from the days of the revolution to the modern presidency.  

For instance, many of the debates on voting rights in Paine’s day are relevant in America today.  The same can be said about conversations around the criteria or qualifications to be a citizen.  

Paine says that aristocracy and oligarchy should be rejected.  Likewise, Paine says the worst kind of government is one where decisions are subject to the passions of a single individual.  I advise those in the White House to study Paine’s writings on what a democratic republic should looks like.  

Borrowing from Paul Simon, one might be tempted to ask, where have you gone, Thomas Paine?  

Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, Professor of Modern History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, on February 15 spoke at the Paine Building on The Age of Reason. 

“By criticizing the adulterous connection between the church and state,” he said, “by demonstrating the impossibility of the Bible being the word of God, and by proposing the equality of all creatures before God, Paine had devastating effects on the governments using religion to maintain hierarchies and oppression.” As a consequence, “the question of democracy was at the heart of religious debate at the time.” 

The debate continues. 

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Thomas Edison, among the most famous men of the early 20th century, played a vital role in restoring the public reputation of Thomas Paine. A great admirer of Paine since his youth, Edison attended the 1925 groundbreaking ceremony for the Thomas Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle. 

Pulitzer Prize winning political biographer Edmund Morris, in his 2019 Edison, tells how Edison found Paine as a child in Michigan before the Civil War. Edison’s father, a “radical, randy, secessionist,” Morris writes, “had ‘larned’ him the complete works of Thomas Paine when he was still a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad.” 

Edison’s affinity for Paine led him to befriend William van der Weyde at the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. To introduce van der Weyde’s 1925 biography, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, he wrote: 

“I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was thirteen. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which showed from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us…. 

“Many a person who could not understand Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp…. 

“He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea by which other men often express the name of deity…. 

“He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle, the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in the diversity of things.”

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The Federalist Party, anointed by most historians as the founding party of the new United States, shaped the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787. Their conservative and nationalist ideas were voiced in 85 newspaper essays, collected in “The Federalist Papers,” to counter arguments against the plan from those who wanted more democracy in the new government. 

America’s first official political party, Federalists dominated the government from 1789 to 1801. Founded by Alexander Hamilton, fronted by President John Adams, The Federalist Party favored plutocracy, a strong central government ruled by a few rich power brokers. Their 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts legalized deporting immigrants and stifling free speech. 

Drawing on deep Tory sympathies in New England, the Federalists advocated London’s agenda in America. They blocked Paris interests after the French Revolution. British leaders called the Federalists the “English Party” and “Oligarch Party.” Adams was seen as a monarchist after proposing hereditary succession for the U.S. presidency. 

The Federalist Party lost the 1800 election to the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson, who won votes by upholding states’ rights over Hamilton’s federal power, as with the central bank. Jefferson fought Hamilton’s autocratic claim of “implied powers” not granted in the Constitution. President Jefferson in 1802 invited Thomas Paine to return to America after his imprisonment in France by Robespierre, urged on by the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, a Federalist. 

Writing letters to the nation from New Rochelle and then Greenwich Village, Paine waged war against the Federalist usurpation of the American Revolution. He championed the principles of democracy. Federalists were his enemy as much as the British lords. Here are some of Paine’s analyses. 

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By Judah Freed

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine had “democratic consequences,” said Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, Professor of Modern History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. 

In a February 15 talk at the Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle, Dr. Carvalho said, “By criticizing the adulterous connection between church and state, by demonstrating the impossibility of the Bible being the word of God, and by proposing the equality of all creatures before God, Paine had devastating effects on the governments using religion to maintain hierarchies and oppression.” 

As a result of Paine, he said, “The question of democracy was at the heart of religious debate at the time.” These same debates continue today. 

Livestreaming on Zoom from the Memorial Building, the program signals growing global reach for the Thomas Paine Historical Association. 

Daniel Carvalho earned a doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 2017. He then served as a professor in the University of Brasília Graduate Program in Ideas. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution (Editora Paco, 2023).

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Part Three of Three Parts 

When most founding members of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association no longer served on the TPNHA board, others joined the association and took active leadership roles. They reflected the founding philosophy and ideas that prevailed at the turn of the century. 

The philosophy of “anarchism” was popular in leftwing circles in the early 1900s. The American socialism advocated by northeastern progressives often mixed with anarchism. Emma Goldman, the ideological lightning rod, advocated an “anarcho-communist” philosophy that did not separate from socialism, per se, until after World War I. 

Edwin C. Walker and Theodore Schroeder stepped into TPNHA leadership in the early 1900s. Walker was presiding at meetings by 1901, becoming vice president as TPNHA incorporated in 1906. Schroeder became the secretary at that time. 

Edwin C. Walker was respected as a political philosopher and outspoken opponent of the Comstock Law. He wrote the 1903 pamphlet, Who is the Enemy: Anthony Comstock or You? 

His 1904 book, Communism and Conscience, espoused free-market anarchism (related then to individualist anarchism, anarcho-capitalism and libertarian socialism). “I can have little faith,” Walker wrote, ”in the professed love of liberty of one who denies to me the opportunity to hear what he or she does not care to hear, just as I can have little faith in the professions of the Censor who denies to me the opportunity to read what he does not care to read.” 

The TPNHA’s leadership had anarchist affiliations beyond Walker. The leading representative and advocate for anarchism, Emma Goldman, had ties to TPNHA’s Ned Foote and William van der Weyde, plus the Manhattan Liberal Club and the Liberal League. 

Theodore Schroeder grew up in Wisconsin, earned an 1898 law degree, practiced in Utah until relocating to New York in 1900. In 1902, Schroeder formed the Free Speech League (precursor of ACLU) with Lincoln Steffens, TPNHA founder Ned Foote. and other progressives. As a lawyer advocating free speech rights and sexual freedom, he defended Emma Goldman at her Comstock trial in Denver circa 1910. 

At the 1905 rededication of the Paine Monument in New Rochelle, the speakers featured Schroeder with surviving TPNHA founders Thaddeus Wakeman and Ned Foote plus the New Rochelle mayor. A year later Schroeder was voted secretary of the TPNHA. 

Schroeder wrote on the legal absurdities of Comstock. The Free Speech League in 1906 published his booklet, What is Criminally “Obscene”? and a three-part, Freedom of the Press and ‘“Obscene’”Literature. He compiled the 1909 Free Press Anthology. He wrote the 1911 book on press freedoms, “Obscene” Literature and Constitutional Law. Years later he wrote two 1945 biographic pamphlets about Thomas Paine. A Paine statuette sat on Schroeder’s desk until he died in 1953. 

Leonard Abbott exemplified a blend of anarchism and socialism among Progressive Era TPNHA leaders in the early 1900s The son of a wealthy English merchant, he read Paine’s Rights of Man as a student before immigrating to the United States in 1898. 

Shortly after arrival in New York, Abbott met anarchist Emma Goldman. He befriended J. William Lloyd, a libertarian individualist anarchist and “natural law” mystic, The pair published Free Comrade from 1900 to 1912. Abbott joined the executive board of the Socialist Party of America in 1900. He joined Eugene V. Debs in leading the Social Democratic Party. He introduced Upton Sinclair to socialism in 1902. Abbott in 1906 joined the founding board of the Rand School. He was active in the TPNHA by 1908 and became president for one year in 1910. 

After the 1909 execution in Spain of freethinker Francisco Ferrer, Abbot worked with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to establish the Ferrer School and colony as educational centers for anarchist philosophy. The school was forced to close after a 1914 anarchist bombing against John D. Rockefeller. Abbott spoke about the bombers killed to a crowd of 5,000.

TPNHA links to activist anarchists could not have happened without the blessings of founder Thaddeus Wakeman, a guiding hand of the association until his passing in 1913. Respected as a political philosopher, T.B. Wakeman was a social progressive with an affinity for anarchist views. A Monist (monism versus dualism), he held that all existence has one origin, so all individuals share natural unity and equality. Wakeman stepped up when needed to become president in 1908 and 1911, meanwhile mentoring younger TPNHA leaders. 

James F. Morton, an anarchist writer, served as the president between Wakeman in 1911 and William van der Weyde in 1914. Morton encapsulated the politics of previous leading board members. He graduated from Harvard with W.E.B. DuBois and became active in the NAACP in opposition to bigotry. A personal friend of writer H.P. Lovecraft, Morton wrote for Truth Seeker, Discontent and Mother Earth. He was part of the Ferrer School in New York City. 

William van der Weyde, a noted photojournalist, succeeded Schroeder as TPNHA secretary in 1909. He served as secretary until becoming president in 1914, serving as president until he died in 1929. His legacy includes locating Paine’s death mask and a lock of his hair, still archived in New Rochelle. 

An innovator in photography for newspapers and night photography, he photographed significant people of his day, such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Capt. Alfred Dreyfus of France. 

William van der Weyde and his photographer father were members of the Manhattan Liberal Club. For Mother Earth, he wrote, “Thomas Paine’s Anarchism.” His premise and arguments have since been undercut by modern Paine scholars, yet his anarchist influence is clear. “Paine was an ardent believer in civilization and education,” he wrote. “Were men [sic] but sufficiently civilized, they would have no need for government.” 

More than anarchism, Paine and free thought have united and guided the TPNHA since 1884.

Premiere 1900s events for TPNHA — rededication of the Paine monument in 1905, the 1909 centennial of Paine’s death — were covered by Truth Seeker editor George Macdonald, who succeeded brother Eugene. He led TPNHA committees into the 1910s. 

Honorary TPNHA vice presidents active in the 1910s and 1920s included Ernst Haeckel (German zoologist, Darwinian biologist and Monist with ties to Wakeman); Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner (freethinking English philosopher and peace activist, the daughter of English atheist writer and Member of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh); Anatole France (Nobel Prize winning author and freethinker); Eden Phillpotts (English novelist, poet and dramatist), Georg Brandes (Danish critic and scholar who advanced realism and naturalism); and William Archer (Scottish author, theatre critic and reformer in London).

The association in 1925 built the Thomas Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle near the Paine Monument, backed by freethinking inventor Thomas Edison. He became vice president. His advertising manager at New York Edison, Cyril Nast, became the treasurer to manage construction under van der Weyde. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Norman Thomas, a perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate, gave the keynote address. 

TPNHA president van der Weyde took ill shortly after completion of the Memorial Building. He finally died in 1929 at the onset of the Great Depression. The association’s fortunes declined with depleted resources. 

As leaders departed, the association was sustained by well-meaning staffers. The Memorial Building was used by other groups. TPNHA in the 1980s united with the local Huguenot historical group that ran the relocated Paine Cottage museum at the site. 

Paine advocates began to reassert management of the Memorial Building in the 1990s. TPNHA regained independence. The association has evolved substantially since its first four decades, dropping politics and beliefs other than Paine’s own views. 

The formative first 40 years of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association provides the historical memory informing our efforts. A broad-minded board now directs our affairs. We’re renovating the Memorial Building, reviving The Beacon and revamping our website (stay tuned). The association today plays a leading role in Thomas Paine Studies, advancing scholarship on Paine and his impact in world history. We’re a global resource for those researching Paine’s life and works. We’re now preparing for the 2026 release of the six-volume Thomas Paine: Collected Works, coinciding with the 250th anniversary for the publication of Common Sense. 

The association remains an all-volunteer organization supported by the American and world freethought community and friends of Thomas Paine. Educating the public on Paine and his legacy is increasingly vital today. 

Thomas Paine is an inspiring mentor for progressives to libertarians who value reason, freedom of thought and democracy. As T.B. Wakeman said at our founding, we act “to perpetuate the memory and works of Thomas Paine, to obtain and disseminate accurate information about him, to refute the various slanders and fables that have been circulated concerning him.”

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Part Two of Three Parts

Responding to assaults on civil liberties under the 1873 Comstock Act, freethinkers played central roles in the social reform movement opposing abuses of the rich and powerful in the Gilded Age. They were guided by Thomas Paine and Enlightenment Age ideals of democracy, equality and natural rights. 

The TPNHA’s founding board represented the freethinking liberal movement in late 19th century America, which fought Gilded Age repressions. 

Founded in 1884, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association upheld its founders’ philosophical foundations in freethought, free speech, women’s rights, labor organizing, anarchism, and socialism.This shifted after the first world war as society shifted. 

TPNHA founders were tied to the Liberal League, People’s Party of New York and the Populist Party. Many met through the Manhattan Liberal Club, a New York locus for free thought. The People’s Party was an east coast version of agrarian populism, which sprouted among south and west farmers and spread to the trade unions. The TPNHA was formed just before the National Liberal League split into factions. 

The strongest bond uniting the TPNHA founders in 1884 was free thought and the leading freethought newspaper, The Truth Seeker. Nine TPNHA founding members had direct ties to The Truth Seeker’s editor, D.M. Bennett (De Robigne Mortimer Bennett). In 1879, he was arrested and convicted under the Comstock Act for mailing an anti-marriage tract. His sentence was 13 months of hard labor. 

Bennett called on freethinkers when he spearheaded the 1881 fund-raising drive to renovate the vandalized Thomas Paine Monument in New Rochelle, erected in 1839. At the Memorial Day rededication, Bennett delivered a speech and visited the farmhouse where Paine lived before his 1809 death. Bennett died in 1882. 

Meet the TPNHA founders tied to Bennett: 

Thaddeus Wakeman, a former university president, was D.M. Bennett’s lawyer, defending the editor from his Comstock Act prosecution. He was active in New York politics as the President of the Liberal League. Wakeman was the main force behind TPNHA formation, chairing the organizing meeting in the Liberal Club on January 29, 1884, at the club’s annual celebration of Paine’s birthday, a date observed widely by freethinkers. 

Dr. Edward Bond Foote, Jr., established the National Defense Association and worked with the National Liberal League in efforts to repeal Comstock laws and support Comstock Act victims. “Ned” was a founding member of the Free Speech League and Manhattan Liberal Club. He took leadership roles in organizations backing a woman’s right to contraception, defying Comstock morality. He gave financial support to Mother Jones and Emma Goldman. 

Dr. Edward Bliss Foote, Sr., Ned’s father, a free speech activist, was among the very first arrested under Comstock for promoting sexual education and contraception rights. He also ran for the New York Senate under the Populist and People’s Party banners. Ned and his father were personal friends of Bennett. 

Asenath Chase Macdonald, a Civil War widow and freethinker, was among America’s first trained nurses. Her sons joined Bennett at The Truth Seeker. 

Eugene and George Macdonald, the sons of Arsenath, first worked for Bennett as a printer and printer’s devil, respectively. Years later, Eugene with partners bought the enterprise. George became the editor in 1907, serving in the role until 1937. 

A.E. Chamberlain, a People’s Party member and Truth Seeker contributor, was a founder of the National Defense Association along with Dr. E.B. Foote Jr, and T.B. Wakeman. Formed to fight “Comstockery,” NDA evolved into the American Civil Liberties Union. 

Theron Leland, a friend of Bennett, was an abolitionist and among New York’s first “phonographers” (phonetic shorthand stenographer) A member of the National Liberal League and Liberal Club, he staffed the office of the American Industrial Union. 

Wilson MacDonald, a noted sculptor, was a liberal and spiritualist. He created the bust atop the Paine Monument and made the medallion on the D.M. Bennett monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery. He made busts of George Washington, Washington Irving, Wm. Cullen Bryan and others. MacDonald stayed active in the TPNHA through the turn of the century. 

Daniel E. Ryan, another friend of Bennett, was a Liberal League and Liberal Club member. He’s named in the TPNHA founding meeting minutes. 

Louis Freeland Post, not directly tied to Bennett, was a prominent Georgist who upheld Paine’s Agrarian Justice to assert income from land innately belongs equally to all. He was editor of the pro-labor New York Truth. In 1913 Post became Asst. Secretary of Labor under Woodrow Wilson, doing the job until 1921. He witnessed the Bureau of Immigration conducting the Palmer Raids to deport noncitizen immigrants under the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act. He could not stop the red-scare witch hunt, but his 1923 memoir called the raids “deportation delirium,” labeling them a “stupendous and cruel fake.” 

Stephen Pearl Andrews was an abolitionist, labor movement advocate and women’s suffrage supporter. A linguist and political philosopher, the “libertarian socialist” and “individualist anarchist” wrote 17 books on personal autonomy and related topics. 

Samuel Porter Putnam, a former Congregational and Unitarian minister, departed Christianity for freethinking. When the Liberal League split, he allied with the American Secular Union. In 1892 Putnam formed the Freethought Federation of America, which in 1895 merged with the American Secular Union. He urged separating church and state. 

Charles P. Somerby was a freethinking New York publisher and bookseller. He published titles like The Ultimate Generalization (a philosophy of science). 

Capt. George Loyd, a Civil War veteran in the Populist Party, for years cared for Paine’s gravesite. 

Two local women are named in the 1884 TPNHA organizing meeting minutes. Mrs. Kate G. Foote, the wife of Dr. Foote Jr., and Mrs. Hannah A. Allen. Their backstories are unknown. 

These are the freethinkers who in 1884 founded the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. In response to renewed repressions in the 20th century, the organization would evolve.

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By Barbara Crane

Invited by President Monroe to commemorate the American Revolution and to celebrate America’s friendship with France, the Marquis de Lafayette sailed back to America in 1824 and devoted a year to his “Farewell Tour” of all 24 states at the time. He was accompanied by Fanny Wright. 

Celebrating the 2024 bicentennial of Lafayette’s visit to New Rochelle, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association (TPNHA) and the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association (H&NRHA) in cooperation with the American Friends of Lafayette (AFL) and the City of New Rochelle will offer free events on Sunday, August 18, such as a re-enactment of Lafayette’s welcome in New Rochelle and Westchester County.   

The community gathering will feature local dignitaries, a Lafayette re-enactor, ceremonies, and family-friendly fun from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., all at Ruby Dee Park in front of the New Rochelle Public Library.  

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette (Lafayette) and Thomas Paine were closely aligned in the period leading up to the French Revolution.  Paine lectured Lafayette and Jefferson in Paris in 1789 on democratic principles. In 1790, Lafayette sent the Key to the Bastille to George Washington through Thomas Paine.   

All Lafayette Tour events in New Rochelle are free. 

For details, visit CelebrateLafayette200.org

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