It was rumored that Paine"s adherents were keeping him under the influence of liquor in order that he might not recant,--so convinced, at heart, or enamoured of Calvinism was this martyr of Theism, who had published his "Age of Reason" from the prison where he awaited the guillotine.*
* Engineer Randel (orthodox), in his topographical report to the Clerk of the City Council (1864), mentions that the "very worthy mechanic," Amasa Wordsworth, who saw Paine daily, told him "there was no truth in such report, and that Thomas Paine had declined saying anything on that subject [religion]." "Paine," testifies Dr. Francis, "clung to his infidelity to the last moment of his natural life." Dr.
Francis (orthodox) heard that Paine yielded to King Alcohol, but says Cheetham wrote with "settled malignity," and suspects "sinister motives" in his "strictures on the fruits of unbelief in the degradation of the wretched Paine."
Of what his principles had cost him Paine had near his end a reminder that cut him to the heart. Albert Gallatin had remained his friend, but his connections, the Fews and Nicholsons, had ignored the author they once idolized. The woman for whom he had the deepest affection, in America, had been Kitty Nicholson, now Mrs. Few. Henry Adams, in his biography of Gallatin, says: "When confined to his bed with his last illness he [Paine] sent for Mrs. Few, who came to see him, and when they parted she spoke some words of comfort and religious hope. Poor Paine only turned his face to the wall, and kept silence." What is Mr. Adams"
authority for this? According to Rick-man, Sherwin, and Vale, Mr. and Mrs. Few came of their own accord, and "Mrs. Few expressed a wish to renew their former friendship." Paine said to her, "very impressively, "You have neglected me, and I beg that you will leave the room." Mrs.
Few went into the garden and wept bitterly." I doubt this tradition also, but it was cruelly tantalizing for his early friend, after ignoring him six years, to return with Death.
If, amid tortures of this kind, the annoyance of fanatics and the "Painites" who came to watch them, and the paroxysms of pain, the sufferer found relief in stimulants, the present writer can only reflect with satisfaction that such resource existed. For some time no food would stay on his stomach. In such weakness and helplessness he was for a week or so almost as miserable as the Christian spies could desire, and his truest friends were not sorrowful when the peace of death approached. After the years in which the stories of Paine"s wretched end have been acc.u.mulating, now appears the testimony of the Catholic lady,--persons who remember Madame Bonneville a.s.sure me that she was a perfect lady,--that Paine"s mind was active to the last, that shortly before death he made a humorous retort to Dr. Romaine, that he died after a tranquil night.
Paine died at eight o"clock on the morning of June 8, 1809. Shortly before, two clergymen had invaded his room, and so soon as they spoke about his opinions Paine said: "Let me alone; good morning!" Madame Bonneville asked if he was satisfied with the treatment he had received in her house, and he said "Oh yes." These were the last words of Thomas Paine.
On June 10th Paine"s friends a.s.sembled to look on his face for the last time. Madame Bonneville took a rose from her breast and laid it on that of her dead benefactor. His adherents were busy men, and mostly poor; they could not undertake the then difficult journey (nearly twenty-five miles) to the grave beyond New Roch.e.l.le. Of the _cortege_ that followed Paine a contemptuous account was printed (Aug. 7th) in the London Packet:
"Extract of a letter dated June 20th, Philadelphia, written by a gentleman lately returned from a tour: "On my return from my journey, when I arrived near Harlem, on York island, I met the funeral of Tom Paine on the road. It was going on to East Chester. The followers were two negroes, the next a carriage with six drunken Irishmen, then a riding chair with two men in it, one of whom was asleep, and then an Irish Quaker on horseback. I stopped my sulkey to ask the Quaker what funeral it was; he said it was Paine, and that his friends as well as his enemies were all glad that he was gone, for he had tired his friends out by his intemperance and frailties. I told him that Paine had done a great deal of mischief in the world, and that, if there was any purgatory, he certainly would have a good share of it before the devil would let him go. The Quaker replied, he would sooner take his chance with Paine than any man in New York, on that score. He then put his horse on a trot, and left me.""
The funeral was going to West Chester; one of the vehicles contained Madame Bonneville and her children; and the Quaker was not an Irishman.
I have ascertained that a Quaker did follow Paine, and that it was Willett Hicks. Hicks, who has left us his testimony that Paine was "a good man, and an honest man," may have said that Paine"s friends were glad that he was gone, for it was only humane to so feel, but all said about "intemperance and frailties" is doubtless a gloss of the correspondent, like the "drunken Irishmen" subst.i.tuted for Madame Bonneville and her family.
Could the gentleman of the sulky have appreciated the historic dignity of that little _cortege_ he would have turned his horse"s head and followed it. Those two negroes, travelling twenty-five miles on foot, represented the homage of a race for whose deliverance Paine had pleaded from his first essay written in America to his recent entreaty for the President"s intervention in behalf of the slaughtered negroes of Domingo.* One of those vehicles bore the wife of an oppressed French author, and her sons, one of whom was to do gallant service to this country in the War of 1812, the other to explore the unknown West.
Behind the Quaker preacher, who would rather take his chance in the next world with Paine than with any man in New York, was following invisibly another of his family and name, who presently built up Hicksite Quakerism, the real monument of Paine, to whom unfriendly Friends refused a grave.
* "On the last day men shall wear On their heads the dust, As ensign and as ornament Of their lowly trust."--Hafis.
The grand people of America were not there, the clergy were not there; but beside the negroes stood the Quaker preacher and the French Catholic woman. Madame Bonneville placed her son Benjamin--afterwards General in the United States army--at one end of the grave, and standing herself at the other end, cried, as the earth fell on the coffin: "Oh, Mr. Paine, my son stands here as testimony of the grat.i.tude of America, and I for France!"
No sooner was Paine dead than the ghoul sat gloating upon him. I found in the Rush papers a letter from Cheetham (July 31st) to Benjamin Rush: "Since Mr. Paine"s arrival in this city from Washington, when on his way you very properly avoided him, his life, keeping the lowest company, has been an uninterrupted scene of filth, vulgarity, and drunkenness. As to the reports, that on his deathbed he had something like compunctious visitings of conscience with regard to his deistical writings and opinions, they are altogether groundless. He resisted very angrily, and with a sort of triumphant and obstinate pride, all attempts to draw him from those doctrines. Much as you must have seen in the course of your professional practice of everything that is offensive in the poorest and most depraved of the species, perhaps you have met with nothing excelling the miserable condition of Mr. Paine. He had scarcely any visitants. It may indeed be said that he was totally neglected and forgotten. Even Mrs. Bournville (sic) a woman, I cannot say a Lady, whom he brought with him from Paris, the wife of a Parisian of that name, seemed desirous of hastening his death. He died at Greenwich, in a small room he had hired in a very obscure house. He was hurried to his grave with hardly an attending person. An ill-natured epitaph, written on him in 1796, when it was supposed he was dead, incorrectly describes the latter end of his life. He
"Blasphemes the Almighty, lives in filth like a hog, Is abandoned in death and interr"d like a dog."
The object of this letter was to obtain from Rush, for publication, some abuse of Paine; but the answer honored Paine, save for his heresy, and is quoted by freethinkers as a tribute.
Within a year the grave opened for Cheetham also, and he sank into it branded by the law as the slanderer of a woman"s honor, and scourged by the community as a traitor in public life.
The day of Paine"s death was a day of judgment. He had not been struck blind or dumb; Satan had not carried him off; he had lived beyond his threescore years and ten and died peacefully in his bed. The self-appointed messengers of Zeus had managed to vex this Prometheus who brought fire to men, but could not persuade him to whine for mercy, nor did the predicted thunderbolts come. This immunity of Thomas Paine brought the deity of dogma into a dilemma. It could be explained only on the the theory of an apology made and accepted by the said deity.
Plainly there had to be a recantation somewhere. Either Paine had to recant or Dogma had to recant.
The excitement was particularly strong among the Quakers, who regarded Paine as an apostate Quaker, and perhaps felt compromised by his desire to be buried among them. Willett Hicks told Gilbert Vale that he had been beset by pleading questions. "Did thee never hear him call on Christ?" "As for money," said Hicks, "I could have had any sum." There was found, later on, a Quakeress, formerly a servant in the family of Willett Hicks, not proof against such temptations. She pretended that she was sent to carry some delicacy to Paine, and heard him cry "Lord Jesus have mercy upon me"; she also heard him declare "if the Devil has ever had any agency in any work he has had it in my writing that book [the "Age of Reason"]."* Few souls are now so belated as to credit such stories; but my readers may form some conception of the mental condition of the community in which Paine died from the fact that such absurdities were printed, believed, spread through the world. The Quaker servant became a heroine, as the one divinely appointed witness of Tom Paine"s recantation.
* "Life and Gospel Labors of Stephen Grellet." This "valuable young Friend," as Stephen Grellet calls her, had married a Quaker named Hinsdale. Grellet, a native of France, convert from Voltaire, led the anti-Hicksites, and was led by his partisanship to declare that Elias promised him to suppress his opinions! The cant of the time was that "deism might do to live by but not to die by." But it had been announced in Paine"s obituaries that "some days previous to his demise he had an interview with some Quaker gentlemen on the subject [of burial in their graveyard] but as he declined a renunciation of his deistical opinions his anxious wishes were not complied with." But ten years later, when Hicks"s deism was spreading, death-bed terrors seemed desirable, and Mary (Roscoe) Hinsdale, formerly Grellet"s servant also, came forward to testify that the recantation refused by Paine to the "Quaker gentlemen," even for a much desired end, had been previously confided to her for no object at all! The story was published by one Charles Collins, a Quaker, who afterwards admitted to Gilbert Vale his doubts of its truth, adding "some of our friends believe she indulges in opiates." (Vale, p. 186).
But in the end it was that same Mary that hastened the resurrection of Thomas Paine. The controversy as to whether Mary was or was not a calumniator; whether orthodoxy was so irresistible that Paine must needs surrender at last to a servant-girl who told him she had thrown his book into the fire; whether she was to be believed against her employer, who declared she never saw Paine at all; all this kept Paine alive.
Such boiling up from the abysses, of vulgar credulity, grotesque superst.i.tion, such commanding ill.u.s.trations of the Age of Unreason, disgusted thoughtful Christians.*
* The excitement of the time was well ill.u.s.trated in a notable caricature by the brilliant artist John Wesley Jarvis. Paine is seen dead, his pillow "Common Sense," his hand holding a ma.n.u.script, "A rap on the knuckles for John Mason." On his arm is the label, "Answer to Bishop Watson."
Under him is written: "A man who devoted his whole life to the attainment of two objects--rights of man and freedom of conscience--had his vote denied when living, and was denied a grave when dead!" The Catholic Father O"Brian (a notorious drunkard), with very red nose, kneels over Paine, exclaiming, "Oh you ugly drunken beast!" The Rev. John Mason (Presbyterian) stamps on Paine, exclaiming, "Ah, Tom!
Tom! thou "t get thy frying in h.e.l.l; they "ll roast thee like a herring.
"They "ll put thee in the furnace hot, And on thee bar the door: How the devils all will laugh To hear thee burst and roar!"
The Rev. Dr. Livingston kicks at Paine"s head, exclaiming,
"How are the mighty fallen, Right fol-de-riddle-lol!"
Bishop Hobart kicks the feet, tinging: "Right fol-de-rol, let"s dance and sing, Tom is dead, G.o.d save the king-- The infidel now low doth lie-- Sing Hallelujah--hallelujah!"
A Quaker turns away with a shovel, saying, "I "ll not bury thee."
Such was the religion which was supposed by some to have won Paine"s heart at last, but which, when mirrored in the controversy over his death, led to a tremendous reaction. The division in the Quaker Society swiftly developed. In December, 1826, there was an afternoon meeting of Quakers of a critical kind, some results of which led directly to the separation. The chief speaker was Elias Hicks, but it is also recorded that "Willet Hicks was there, and had a short testimony, which seemed to be impressive on the meeting." He had stood in silence beside the grave of the man whose chances in the next world he had rather take than those of any man in New York; but now the silence is broken.*
* Curiously enough, Mary (Roscoe) Hinsdale turned up again.
She had broken down under the cross-examination of William Cobbett, but he had long been out of the country when the Quaker separation took place. Mary now reported that a distinguished member of the Hicksite Society, Mary Lock wood, had recanted in the same way as Paine. This being proved false, the hysterical Mary sank and remained in oblivion, from which she is recalled only by the Rev. Rip Van Winkle. It was the unique sentence on Paine to recant and yet be d.a.m.ned. This honor belies the indifference expressed in the rune taught children sixty years ago:
"Poor Tom Paine! there he lies: n.o.body laughs and n.o.body cries: Where he has gone or how he fares, n.o.body knows and n.o.body cares!"
I told Walt Whitman, himself partly a product of Hicksite Quakerism, of the conclusion to which I had been steadily drawn, that Thomas Paine rose again in Elias Hicks, and was in some sort the origin of our one American religion. I said my visit was mainly to get his "testimony" on the subject for my book, as he was born in Hicks" region, and mentions in "Specimen Days" his acquaintance with Paine"s friend, Colonel Fellows. Walt said, for I took down his words at the time:
"In my childhood a great deal was said of Paine in our neighborhood, in Long Island. My father, Walter Whitman, was rather favorable to Paine.
I remember hearing Elias Hicks preach; and his look, slender figure, earnestness, made an impression on me, though I was only about eleven.
He died in 1830. He is well represented in the bust there, one of my treasures. I was a young man when I enjoyed the friendship of Col.
Fellows,--then a constable of the courts; tall, with ruddy face, blue eyes, snowy hair, and a fine voice; neat in dress, an old-school gentleman, with a military air, who used to awe the crowd by his looks; they used to call him "Aristides." I used to chat with him in Tammany Hall. It was a time when, in religion, there was as yet no philosophical middle-ground; people were very strong on one side or the other; there was a good deal of lying, and the liars were often well paid for their work. Paine and his principles made the great issue. Paine was double-d.a.m.nably lied about. Col. Fellows was a man of perfect truth and exactness; he a.s.sured me that the stories disparaging to Paine personally were quite false. Paine was neither drunken nor filthy; he drank as other people did, and was a high-minded gentleman. I incline to think you right in supposing a connection between the Paine excitement and the Hicksite movement. Paine left a deep, clear-cut impression on the public mind. Col. Fellows told me that while Paine was in New York he had a much larger following than was generally supposed. After his death a reaction in his favor appeared among many who had opposed him, and this reaction became exceedingly strong between 1820 and 1830, when the division among the Quakers developed. Probably William Cobbett"s conversion to Paine had something to do with it. Cobbett lived in the neighborhood of Elias Hicks, in Long Island, and probably knew him.
Hicks was a fair-minded man, and no doubt read Paine"s books carefully and honestly. I am very glad you are writing the Life of Paine. Such a book has long been needed. Paine was among the best and truest of men."
Paine"s risen soul went marching on in England also. The pretended recantation proclaimed there was exploded by William Cobbett, and the whole controversy over Paine"s works renewed. One after another deist was sent to prison for publishing Paine"s works, the last being Richard Carlile and his wife. In 1819, the year in which William Cobbett carried Paine"s bones to England, Richard Carlile and his wife, solely for this offence, were sent to prison,--he for three years, with fine of 1,500, she for two years, with fine of 500,* This was a suicidal victory for bigotry. When these two came out of prison they found that wealthy gentlemen had provided for them an establishment in Fleet Street, where these books were thenceforth sold unmolested. Mrs.
Carlile"s pet.i.tion to the House of Commons awakened that body and the whole country. When Richard Carlile entered prison it was as a captive deist; when he came out the freethinkers of England were generally atheists.
* I have before me an old fly-leaf picture, issued by Carlile in the same year. It shows Paine in his chariot advancing against Superst.i.tion. Superst.i.tion is a snaky- haired demoness, with poison-cup in one hand and dagger in the other, surrounded by instruments of torture, and treading on a youth. Behind her are priests, with mask, crucifix, and dagger. Burning f.a.ggots surround them with a cloud, behind which are worshippers around an idol, with a priest near by, upholding a crucifix before a man burning at the stake. Attended by fair genii, who uphold a banner inscribed, "Moral Rect.i.tude." Paine advances, uplifting in one hand the mirror of Truth, in the other his "Age of Reason." There are ten stanzas describing the conflict, Superst.i.tion being described as holding
"in va.s.salage a doating World, Till Paine and Reason burst upon the mind, And Truth and Deism their flag unfurled."
But what was this atheism? Merely another Declaration of Independence.
Common sense and common justice were entering into religion as they were entering into government. Such epithets as "atheism," "infidelity,"
were but labels of outlawry which the priesthood of all denominations p.r.o.nounced upon men who threatened their throne, precisely as "sedition"
was the label of outlawry fixed by Pitt on all hostility to George III.
In England, atheism was an insurrection of justice against any deity diabolical enough to establish the reign of terror in that country or any deity worshipped by a church which imprisoned men for their opinions. Paine was a theist, but he arose legitimately in his admirer Sh.e.l.ley, who was punished for atheism. Knightly service was done by Sh.e.l.ley in the struggle for the Englishman"s right to read Paine. If any enlightened religious man of to-day had to choose between the G.o.dlessness of Sh.e.l.ley and the G.o.dliness that imprisoned good men for their opinions, he would hardly select the latter. The genius of Paine was in every word of Sh.e.l.ley"s letter to Lord Ellenborough on the punishment of Eaton for publishing the "Age of Reason."*
* "Whence is any right derived, but that which power confers, for persecution? Do you think to convert Mr. Eaton to your religion by embittering his existence? You might force him by torture to profess your tenets, but he could not believe them except you should make them credible, which perhaps exceeds your power. Do you think to please the G.o.d you worship by this exhibition of your zeal? If so the demon to whom some nations offer human hecatombs is less barbarous than the Deity of civilized society.... Does the Christian G.o.d, whom his followers eulogize as the deity of humility and peace--he, the regenerator of the world, the meek reformer--authorise one man to rise against another, and, because lictors are at his beck, to chain and torture him as an infidel? When the Apostles went abroad to convert the nations, were they enjoined to stab and poison all who disbelieved the divinity of Christ"s mission?... The time is rapidly approaching--I hope that you, my Lord, may live to behold its arrival--when the Mahometan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community, equally sharing the benefits which arrive from its a.s.sociation, and united in the bonds of charity and brotherly love."
In America "atheism" was never anything but the besom which again and again has cleared the human mind of phantasms represented in outrages on honest thinkers. In Paine"s time the phantasm which was called Jehovah represented a grossly ignorant interpretation of the Bible; the revelation of its monstrous character, represented in the hatred, slander, falsehood, meanness, and superst.i.tion, which Jarvis represented as crows and vultures hovering near the preachers kicking Paine"s dead body, necessarily destroyed the phantasm, whose pretended power was proved nothing more than that of certain men to injure a man who out-reasoned them. Paine"s fidelity to his unanswered argument was fatal to the consecrated phantasm. It was confessed to be ruling without reason, right, or humanity, like the King from whom "Common Sense,"
mainly, had freed America, and not by any "Grace of G.o.d" at all, but through certain reverend Lord Norths and Lord Howes. Paine"s peaceful death, the benevolent distribution of his property by a will affirming his Theism, represented a posthumous and potent conclusion to the "Age of Reason."
Paine had aimed to form in New York a Society for Religious Inquiry, also a Society of Theophilan-thropy. The latter was formed, and his posthumous works first began to appear, shortly after his death, in an organ called _The Theophilanthropist_.
But his movement was too cosmopolitan to be contained in any local organization. "Thomas Paine," said President Andrew Jackson to Judge Hertell, "Thomas Paine needs no monument made by hands; he has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty." The like may be said of his religion: Theophilanthropy, under a hundred translations and forms, is now the fruitful branch of every religion and every sect. The real cultivators of skepticism,--those who ascribe to deity biblical barbarism, and the savagery of nature,--have had their day.
The removal and mystery of Paine"s bones appear like some page of Mosaic mythology.* An English caricature pictured Cobbett seated on Paine"s coffin, in a boat named Rights of Man, rowed by Negro Slaves.
* The bones of Thomas Paine were landed in Liverpool November 21, 1819. The monument contemplated by Cobbett was never raised. There was much parliamentary and munic.i.p.al excitement. A Bolton town-crier was imprisoned nine weeks for proclaiming the arrival. In 1836 the bones pa.s.sed with Cobbett"s effects into the hands of a Receiver (West). The Lord Chancellor refusing to regard them as an a.s.set, they were kept by an old day-laborer until 1844, when they pa.s.sed to B. Tilley, 13 Bedford Square, London, a furniture dealer.
In 1849 the empty coffin was in possession of J. Chennell, Guildford. The silver plate bore the inscription "Thomas Paine, died June 8, 1809, aged 72." In 1854, Rev. R. Ainslie (Unitarian) told E. Truelove that he owned "the skull and the right hand of Thomas Paine," but evaded subsequent inquiries. The removal caused excitement in America. Of Paine"s gravestone the last fragment was preserved by his friends of the Bayeaux family, and framed on their wall. In November, 1839, the present marble monument at New Roch.e.l.le was erected.
"A singular coincidence [says Dr. Francis] led me to pay a visit to Cobbett at his country seat, within a couple of miles of the city, on the island, on the very day that he had exhumed the bones of Paine, and shipped them for England. I will here repeat the words which Cobbett gave utterance to at the friendly interview our party had with him. "I have just performed a duty, gentlemen, which has been too long delayed: you have neglected too long the remains of Thomas Paine. I have done myself the honor to disinter his bones. I have removed them from New Roch.e.l.le. I have dug them up; they are now on their way to England. When I myself return, I shall cause them to speak the common sense of the great man; I shall gather together the people of Liverpool and Manchester in one a.s.sembly with those of London, and those bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State.""