Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859

The memorial was referred to the Committee on Claims. When Paine heard of its fate, he addressed an indignant letter to the Speaker of the House. "I know not who the Committee on Claims are; but if they were men of younger standing than 'the times that tried men's souls,' and consequently too young to know what the condition of the country was at the time I published 'Common Sense,'—for I do not believe that independence would have been declared, had it not been for the effect of that work,—they are not capable of judging of the whole of the services of Thomas Paine. If my memorial was referred to the Committee on Claims for the purpose of losing it, it is unmanly policy. After so many years of service, my heart grows cold towards America."

His heart was soon to grow cold to all the world. In the spring of 1809, it became evident to Paine's attendants that his end was approaching. As death drew near, the memories of early youth arose vividly in his mind. He wished to be buried in the cemetery of the Quakers, in whose principles his father had educated him. He sent for a leading member of the sect to ask a resting-place for his body in their ground. The request was refused.

When the news got abroad that the Arch-Infidel was dying, foolish old women and kindred clergymen, who "knew no way to bring home a wandering sheep but by worrying him to death," gathered together about his bed. Even his physician joined in the hue-and-cry. It was a scene of the Inquisition adapted to North America,—a Protestant auto da fé . The victim lay helpless before his persecutors; the agonies of disease supplied the place of rack and fagot. But nothing like a recantation could be wrung from him. And so his tormentors left him alone to die, and his freethinking smiths and cobblers rejoiced over his fidelity to the cause.

He was buried on his farm at New Rochelle, according to his latest wishes. "Thomas Paine. Author of 'Common Sense,'" the epitaph he had fixed upon, was carved upon his tomb. A better one exists from an unknown hand, which tells, in a jesting way, the secret of the sorrows of his later life:—

Ten years after, William Cobbett, who had left England in a fit of political disgust and had settled himself on Long Island to raise hogs and ruta-bagas, resolved to go home again. Cobbett had become an admirer, almost a disciple of Paine. The "Constitution-grinder" of '96 was now "a truly great man, a truly philosophical politician, a mind as far superior to Pitt and Burke as the light of a flambeau is superior to that of a rush-light." Above all, Paine had been Cobbett's teacher on financial questions. In 1803, Cobbett read his "Decline and Fall of the English System," and then "saw the whole matter in its true light; and neither pamphleteers nor speech-makers were after that able to raise a momentary puzzle in his mind." Perhaps Cobbett thought he might excite a sensation in England and rally about him the followers of Paine, or it may be that he wished to repair the gross injustice he had done him by some open act of adherence; at all events, he exhumed Paine's body and took the bones home with him in 1819, with the avowed intention of erecting a magnificent monument to his memory by subscription. In the same manner, about two thousand two hundred and fifty years ago, the bones of Theseus, the mythical hero of Democracy, were brought from Skyros to Athens by some Attic [Greek: Kobbetaes]. The description of the arrival in England we quote from a Liverpool journal of the day:—"When his last trunk was opened at the Custom-House, Cobbett observed to the surrounding spectators, who had assembled in great numbers,—'Here are the bones of the late Thomas Paine.' This declaration excited a visible sensation, and the crowd pressed forward to see the contents of the package. Cobbett remarked,—'Great, indeed, must that man have been whose very bones attract such attention!' The officer took up the coffin-plate inscribed, 'Thomas Paine, Aged 72. Died January 8, 1809,' and, having lifted up several of the bones, replaced the whole and passed them. They have since been forwarded from this town to London."

At a public dinner given to Cobbett in Liverpool, Paine was toasted as "the Noble of Nature, the Child of the Lower Orders"; but the monument was never raised, and no one knows where his bones found their last resting-place.

Cobbett himself gained nothing by this resurrectionist performance, except an additional couplet in the party-songs of the day:—

The two were classed together by English Conservatives, as "pestilent fellows" and "promoters of sedition."

It is now fifty years since Paine died; but the nil de mortuis is no rule in his case. The evil associations of his later days have pursued him beyond the grave. A small and threadbare sect of "liberals," as they call themselves,—men in whom want of skill, industry, and thrift has produced the usual results,—have erected an altar to Thomas Paine, and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which is not in them. They like to ascribe their want of success in life to something out of joint in the thoughts and customs of society, rather than to their own shortcomings or incapacity. In France, such persons would be Socialists and Rouges ; in this country, where the better classes only have any reason to rebel, they cannot well conspire against government, but attack religion instead, and pride themselves on their exemption from prejudice. The "Age of Reason" is their manual. Its bold, clear, simple statements they can understand; its shallowness they are too ignorant to perceive; its coarseness is in unison with their manners. Thus the author has become the Apostle of Free-thinking tinkers and the Patron Saint of unwashed Infidelity.

To this generation at large, he is only an indistinct shadow,—a faint reminiscence of a red nose,—an ill-flavored name, redolent of brandy and of brimstone, his beverage in life and his well-earned punishment in eternity, which suggests to the serious mind dirt, drunkenness, and hopeless damnation. Mere worldlings call him "Tom Paine," in a tone which combines derision and contempt. A bust of him, by Jarvis, in the possession of the New York Historical Society, is kept under lock and key, because it was defaced and defiled by visitors, while a dozen other plaster worthies that decorate the institution remained intact. Nevertheless, we suspect that most of our readers, if they cannot date back to the first decade of the century, will find, when they sift their information, that they have only a speaking acquaintance with Thomas Paine, and can give no good reason for their dislike of him.

And it is not easy for the general reader to become intimate with him. He will find him, of course, in Biographical Dictionaries, Directories of the City of the Great Dead, which only tell you where men lived, and what they did to deserve a place in the volume; but as to a life of him, strictly speaking, there is none. Oldys and Cobbett tried to flay him alive in pamphlets; Sherwin and Clio Rickman were prejudiced friends and published only panegyrics. All are out of print and difficult to find. Cheetham's work is a political libel; and the attempt of Mr. Vail of the "Beacon" to canonize him in the "Infidel's Calendar," cannot be recommended to intelligent persons. We might expect to meet with him in those books of lives so common with us,—collections in which a certain number of deceased gentlemen are bound up together, so resembling each other in feature that one might suppose the narratives ground out by some obituary-machine and labelled afterward to suit purchasers. Even this "sign-post biography," as the "Quarterly" calls it, Paine has escaped. He was not a marketable commodity. There was no demand for him in polite circles. The implacable hand of outraged orthodoxy was against him. Hence his memory has lain in the gutter. Even his friend Joel Barlow left him out of the "Columbiad," to the great disgust of Clio Rickman, who thought his name should have appeared in the Fifth Book between Washington and Franklin. Surely Barlow might have found room for him in the following "Epic List of Heroes":—