'Common Sense' anniversary: The life and times of Thomas Paine (Part 7 of 7)

January 10, 5:09 PMPolitical Issues ExaminerJudah Freed

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Thomas Paine

An American Death

After his return to America in 1801, Paine spent his waning few years in bleakness and declining health. One biographer thought Paine had arteriosclerosis of the brain, but we have no reliable way of knowing.

After a particularly bad spell in 1806, Paine wrote to friend Andrew Dean, "I have passed through an experiment of dying, and I find death has no terrors for me. ...As I am now well enough to sit up some hours in the day, though not well enough to get up without help, I employ myself as I have always done, in endeavoring to bring man to the right use of the reason that God has given him, and to direct his mind immediately to his Creator, and not to fanciful secondary beings called mediators."

Paine tried to earn an income by preparing to publish his collected works, hoping for a revival of his fortunes as he'd enjoyed in 1791. Lacking the vigor or stamina for the venture, however, he had to let the effort lapse.

In the summer of 1808, Paine moved from 309 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village (still a village then) into a first-floor room in the home of a Mr. Ryder on Herring Street, between Columbia and Reason streets (now at 59 Grove Street in Manhattan).

Paine's rent was covered by a friend, Walter Morton, who also paid for house calls by Dr. James Manley, a Christian physician who kept his beliefs to himself, mostly.

For a pittance of support, Paine applied to Congress for some reimbursement as a government representative on the mission to Europe with Laurens, who'd died during the war.

The Committee of Claims responded on February 1, 1809. They rejected the claim because Paine's connection had been with Laurens only, and so his presence was unofficial. The decision to deny Paine was purely political, blocked by congressional Federalists.

Matthew Lyon (convicted under the Alien and Sedition laws) denounced the decision, calling Paine, "the one to whom this nation is indebted for its independence more than to any living being." Such public support came too little and too late. The rejection was devastating, causing apoplexy in old Tom Paine.

Sensing his death approaching, before his lucidity fled, Paine had written his last will in January 1809, requesting burial in the Quaker cemetery, noting that if he was refused, he'd ask no other churches. Even before the event of his death, the Society of Friends declined his request.

Paine's best alternative was a corner of the New Rochelle farm. Mrs. de Bonneville was given executrix instructions for his gravestone to state only, "Author of Common Sense." That headstone later would be broken by vandals and the pieces stolen by souvenir hunters. That's not all that would be taken.

Per his will, a brick wall twelve-feet square was to be erected around the grave site with four trees planted on each corner, two cypresses, two willows.

Paine's last will further ordered the New Rochelle farm to be sold, with half the money going to a friend in London and the other half going to Nicolas and Marguerite de Bonneville "to be held in trust for their children, their education and maintenance." Paine had a premonition that with the farm owned by strangers, his enemies would not let his remains rest in peace.

Paine's health failed rapidly after Congress denied his claim. The rejection apparently deflated his will to live. Madame de Bonneville (working in New York as a French tutor) visited twice weekly. A gentle Quaker watchmaker, Willet Hicks, visited almost daily.

As news spread about Paine's impending death, Christians came to plead with him to repent and save his eternal soul from damnation. In one case, Paine threatened to rise from his sickbed and throw his tormentors out the door.

Friends Albert Gallatin and wife reported Paine confiding to them that he regretted ever returning to America

In his final months, Paine grew bellicose if left alone for too long. The nurse hired by Mrs. de Bonneville, Mrs. Heddon, sat beside his bed near the end. Sometimes she read aloud from a Bible as he dozed off or stared silently into open air. Some days he did not speak at all.

Thomas Paine died in the Ryder home at age 72 on the morning of 8 June 1809. Stories of a deathbed repentance likely are Christian propaganda. Mrs. de Bonneville and a few friends (with two "negro" servants) placed the body in a horse cart and drove the 22 miles north to the Paine farm in New Rochelle.

She conducted there a short funeral, according to her papers. "Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help feeling most acutely. Before the earth was thrown down upon the coffin, I, placing myself at the east end of the grave, said to my son Benjamin, 'stand you there, at the other end, as a witness for grateful America.' Looking about me, and beholding the small group of spectators, I exclaimed, as the earth was tumbled onto the grave, 'Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here in testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!'" (Our tears are never too late.)

A decade later in 1819, one of Paine's harshest critics from earlier years apparently felt moved to atone for his attacks. William Cobbett had Paine's bones dug up from the New Rochelle farm and transported to England for reburial under a grand patriotic monument that Cobbett intended to construct there.

But the British government refused to grant permission for the structure. Paine was still an outlaw. Cobbett died in 1835 with the memorial never erected. A British probate court finally assigned the bones to a receiver. Apart from a jawbone, the fate of Thomas Paine's mortal remains still remains a mystery to this day.

Yet more of Paine's legacy has been lost than his bones. According to biographer Craig Nelson, as part of the scant inheritance Paine left to the de Bonnevilles, all of Paine's surviving manuscripts and letters went to Benjamin de Bonneville. He stored these papers in a St. Louis barn that later was destroyed in a fire. Paine's papers perished in the blaze.

All that survived was Paine's published works plus those surviving letters and journals kept by others. From these elements historians have pieced together the story of his life.

More celebrated and widely read today than during his own lifetime, Thomas Paine demonstrated the power of words to change the world. Shall we learn from his example?

© 2009 by Judah Freed. All rights reserved. Please post links to this article, but you may not re-publish it without written permission. See contact link for Judah Freed below.

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