Common Sense and the Rights of Man in America

Abstract

On June 10, 1809, when Thomas Paine was buried on his own farm in New Rochelle, in Westchester County, New York, there were less than a dozen people at his funeral: Willett Hicks, a Quaker who had been unsuccessful in getting the Society of Friends to accept Paine’s request that he be laid to rest in their burial grounds in New York City; Thomas Addis Emmett, a Paineite political emigré who had been imprisoned in Ireland, now a rising lawyer in the city; Walter Morton, a friend; two African American men, one perhaps the grave-digger; Margaret de Bonneville and her two young sons, Benjamin and Thomas, Paine’s godson, all refugees from Napoleonic France who Paine had sustained in the United States in gratitude for the support she and her husband, Nicholas, had given Paine in France before and after his imprisonment. All these had made the 25-mile journey from Greenwich Village, then on the outskirts of New York City, where Paine had died. They may have been joined by a few neighbors from New Rochelle where he had lived intermittently since his return from France in 1802. No political leaders attended; no one, it seems, gave a eulogy.

I wish to thank the Thomas Paine National Historical Association at whose conference in New Rochelle, New York, 1991, I gave an early version of this essay. Marcus Daniel, Simon Newman, Richard Twomey, and David Wilson offered valuable criticisms of this early draft and generously shared with me their research in progress. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Reilly, Sean Wilentz, James Green, and David Henly for their suggestions and to John Aubrey, Reference Librarian, Newberry Library.