Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 4).djvu/672

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PAINE
PAINE

send John Laurens to France for a loan ; Paine went with Laurens as secretary. Their mission was successful, and they returned to Boston, after an absence of six months, on 25 Aug., 1781, with 3,500,000 livres in silver and military stores in ad- dition. Hard upon this followed Yorktown, and the war was virtually over. After peace was de- clared congress voted Paine, in October, 1785, for his services, $3,000 ; New York, the year before, had given him an estate at New Rochelle ; Penn- sylvania had voted £500 for him ; and only his pamphlet " Public Good," controverting the rights of Virginia to western territory, prevented his ob- taining like recognition from the Virginia legis- lature. With peace once established he devoted himself to his invention for an iron bridge ; he sailed for Europe in April, 1787, taking with him the model of his bridge, which he laid before the academy of sciences at Paris. He succeeded in setting his bridge up in London in 1790. The French revolution had now broken out, an event in which Paine took most lively interest. He was in Paris early in 1790, and at that time received from Lafayette the key of the Bastille to be pre- sented to Washington. Burke's " Reflections on the Revolution of France " appeared in the autumn of the same year, and in the spring of 1791 Paine published his •' Rights of Man " (London). For this he was outlawed by the court of king's bench, notwithstanding an able defence by Erskine. Be- fore his trial, however, he had been elected to the French convention by four constituencies. In France he was received most enthusiastically ; he had had the title of French citizen conferred upon him by the convention on 26 Aug. It should be noticed, however, that Paine did not become natu- ralized in France, but, as Monroe pointed out. re- mained always an American citizen. The com- mittee appointed by the convention on 11 Oct. to frame a constitution included among its members Paine. The trial of the king coming on at this time, he spoke with great courage and no less force in favor of his detention during the war and perpetual banishment thereafter, suggesting the United States as a guard and asylum for the hap- less Louis. The king was beheaded, the Giron- dists fell, and the Jacobins were supreme. Paine had been vigorously denoiinced for his efforts in behalf of the king, and now was forced to seek retirement. He employed himself in the compo- sition of part 1 of his " Age of Reason." This was written to stem the tide of atheism in France ; incidentally it treated of the Bible. With a few expurgations it was circulated as a religious tract in England. But the incidental remarks about the Bible led to answers, and these criticisms he answered in a new book, now called part 2. This was written the year after he left prison, mostly in the house of Monroe, whose guest he became ; it is this second part alone that excited so much wrath. He had just finished his first part when he was arrested, 26 Dec, 1793. He spent over ten months in the Luxembourg prison. After the death of Robespierre, and after Gouverneur Mor- ris had been succeeded as American minister by James Monroe. Paine was released. He was re- stored to the convention, and was first among those to whom pensions were offered, 3 Jan., 1795, an offer that he did not accept. It was his resent- ment at the failure of the United States to inter- vene in his behalf that led to his fierce attack upon Washington in his letter of 3 Aug., 1796. He remained at Paris until the peace of Amiens. Jefferson offered him a ship of war to return to America in. but Paine did not return in it. He I took no active part in politics after his return, but his advice was asked by Jefferson with regard to current events. He took up his residence at Bordentown. X. J. ; in 1804 he removed to his farm at New Rochelle that had been granted him by the state for his revolutionary services. Mme. Bonneville, the wife of a French journalist, who had translated some of Paine's works, and who had been one of Paine's friends in Paris, was his housekeeper. Their relations served as an excuse for allegations on the part of James Cheetham, editor of the '• American Citizen " and a former follower of Paine ; at the trial that ensued Paine was completely acquitted. He spent the last years of his life in New York city, suffering from a lack of money ; he lived at 63 Partition street, then in Herring street (293 Bleecker), and at 59 Grove street, where he died. By his own direction he was buried on his farm at New Rochelle. Ten years later William Cobbett removed the bones to England, with the hope of increasing enthusiasm for the republican ideas, of which Paine was still the favorite exemplar in print : but the move- ment did not produce the desired effect. The re- mains remained at Liverpool until after the death of Cobbett, when they were seized in 1836 as part of the property of his son, who had been forced into bankruptcy. Their present resting-place is unknown. A monument was erected by his ad- mirers in 1841 over the site of his first grave be- side the road from New Rochelle to White Plains. Paine was not an aCheist, nor was he anti-reli- gious. On the contraiT, he felt himself to be fer- vently religious, as religious a man as was Emer- son or Parker or Francis W. Newman. He always believed in the existence of a God, and he iield

high and unselfish ideals of Christian virtues.

I Among Paine's works are " Case of the Officers I of Excise" (printed in 1772, published in 1^93); j "Common Sense" (1776); "Dialogue between General Montgomerv and an American Delegate " (1776); "The Crisis" (1776-83); "Public Good" (1780); "Thoughts on the Peace" (1783); " Dis- i sertations on Government" (1786); "Letter to Sir I G. Stanton," on iron bridges (1788) ; "Address and I Declarations of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty" (1791); the "Rights of Man" (1791-2); " Speech in Convention on bringing Louis Capet to Trial " (1792) : " Reasons for wishing to preserve the Life of Louis Capet " (1793) ; " The Age of Rea- son " (3 parts, 1794, 1795, 1811) ; " Dissertations on the First Principles of Government " (1795) ; " De- cline and Fall of the English Svstem of Finance" (1796); "Letter to George Washington" (1796); " Letter to the People of France " (1797) ; " Letter to Erskine" (1797); "Letters to Citizens of the United States" (1802): "Letter to the People of England " (1804) ; " On the Cause of Yellow Fever " (1805). The best collected edition of his works is that edited by Moncure D. Conway (4 vols., N. Y., 1894-'6). The same author also published a life of Paine (2 vols., N. Y., 1892). Other biographies are bv Francis Oldys (1791) ; James Cheetham (1809)"; Thomas Clio Rickman (1819) ; William T. Sherwin (1819) ; and Gilbert Vale (1841).


PAINE, William, physician, b. in Worcester, Mass., 5 June, 1750; d. there, 19 April, 1833. He was the son of Timothy Paine, a loyalist, and was graduated at Harvard in 1768. Having been proscribed as a loyalist in 1778. he became surgeon to the British forces in Rhode Island and New York, and was surgeon-general in 1782. After the Revolution he settled in New Brunswick, was a member of the assembly for Charlotte county, clerk of that botly. and deputy surveyor of the king's forests in