The Trouble with Tom (28 page)
Read The Trouble with Tom Online
Authors: Paul Collins
Brian nods silently.
"And I've followed Conway's path through New York and London, read his archives, traced him all the way to Farringdon Road, where he bought Paine's brain off of Higham . . . and then followed him to the Hotel Strasbourg, where he mailed the parcel. And, thenâsee, I came across this . . . uh . . ."
I dig through my notes.
"This old newspaper story. About a burial ceremâ"
Blam!
I start and drop my news clipping. "
October 15, 1905
," it reads across the top.
"
Whoo-hooo!"
comes the distant cry of children outside.
"Um . . ." I hold my old article out, not sure what to say next. "About a . . . burial . . . ceremony?" . . . . . .
And then, for a moment, it is dead quiet in the museum. Him, me, and a hundred-year-old article: I can hear the ticking of my own watch.
"Here's what I was told." He pauses. Then he leans forward. 'The monument they dedicated outside? You know that it's
two
pieces?"
I nod. Of course: there's an obelisk that some admirers erected in 1839, and there's the bronze bust that Foote commissioned at the turn of the century. In fact, he commissioned it right about the time Conway bought . . .
wait .
. .
"Well," McCartin says, "there's a
reason
they stuck the bust on top of the column. Conway had a cavity carved out of the top of the obelisk." His hand makes a scooping-out motion. "Right between the capstone and the bronze bust of Paine's head.''
He lets this sink in.
"So that cavity," I mutter. "Is where . . . Dr. Foote . . . ?"
"That's right. That's where he cemented in the box."
I look out a window in the direction of the roadside monumentâthat awkward combination of a bust atop an obeliskâand then I look back at Brian, not sure whether to grin or let my jaw drop. . . . . . . . .
."
"You mean . . . it's . . . it's . .
"Yes."
I stare back out in disbelief, and then a smile spreads across my face. Of course. Of course. Of course that's what they did.
They put his brain in his head.
The mayor had asked the townspeople of New Rochelle to hang out flags on their porches for that fine autumn day, but not many of them did.
"New Rochelle," a
Times
reporter dryly noted, "is a city of churchgoers.''
Well, that reaction was to be expected when the honoree was old Tom Paine. But the townspeople began pouring out into the streets that afternoon anyway to follow the parade as it headed up North Avenue: headed by four rather stout mustachioed men in tight-fitting Minutemen uniforms, the Fort Slocum army band struck up a march on their tubas and trombones as children on bicycles darted in and out and ran alongside.
A line of American flags was hastily strung up between two trees on either side of the avenue so that as the procession of town worthies, schoolchildren, members of the Fort Slocum band, and local military representatives made their way up North Avenue, they found a stage erected with a suitable festooning of red, white, and blue. Behind it all stood the newly moved Paine monument, awaiting its rededication to the care and protection of the citizens of New Rochelle. Soon the avenue became a small sea of hundreds of curious townspeople and visiting big-city reformers alike; chil-dren in newsboy caps, men in vests and derbies, women in long skirts. The band launched into a rousing overture, and then paused for the schoolchildren to begin singing:
In a chariot of light, j-om the regions of the day,
The Goddess of Liberty came,
Ten thousand celestials directed her way
. . .
The brass band struggled to keep time with the children, whose singing of Tom Paine's song lyrics got increasingly wobbly. The children appeared a little frightened. "Somebody must have been telling them dreadful stories about Tom Paine," one man in the crowd theorized aloud as the band stumbled over the final bars of 'The Liberty Tree."
The last off-key notes died out. A minister pronounced a benediction upon the proceedings, and stood aside as a thin, dapper man surmounted the stage: it was Dr. E. B. Foote Jr., proudly stepping in for his ailing father. An autumn wind passed through the orange and yellow leaves of trees about the procession as his first words rang out over the crowd.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he called out. "Others will tell you today of the life and works of Thomas Paine. I am here to give you the
last
chapter in his story."
The men in the band set their trombones at rest, and the children stopped running about; the crowd strained to hear the doctor's voice.
"Paine died," he continued, "at number fifty-nine Grove Street, in New York City, on the morning of June eighth, 1809, and the funeral was held a few days later. His body was brought up from New York and buried somewhere within fifty feet of this monument . . .William Cobbett, an Englishman, raised the bones of Paine and took them back to England with him. At that time Cobbett thought he could effect a revolution in the government of England with the bones of Paine, and that men would get together and erect a great monument to Paine, but from Mr. Cobbett's large idea only small results came.
"The fact is7'âthe doctor looked out over the crowdâ"that nothing was accomplished by the project, and the bones knocked about England for many years until now. No one, Mr. Conway says, knows where they are. In 1833 a man named Tilly . . . secured a small portion of his hair and brain. That piece of brain was handed down until Mr. Conway got hold of it in London. This relic of Paine is here . . ."
Foote paused and drew from his pocket a copper box, patinaed green with age.
"Here."
He held it aloft. "In
this
small box."
The crowd jostled and gawked upward at the object.
"Now," the doctor continued, "this portion of the remains is all that we have left, and it will be placed within this monument. Then we can say the remains of Paine, all that we have, are to be found
here
."
Here.
Here's the strange thing about the bust of Thomas Paine: he's looking away. And I don't mean up into the lofty heavens or straight out into the middle distance. I mean his eyes are averted to one side. I follow his gaze and see that he is looking directly into a house far across the street; in its living room window there is a telltale flicker. And so this is how Paine's big brass head, with his brain clapped firmly inside, is spending eternity: staring into a suburban den and watching
The Price Is Right
.
Actually, the way the monument is built, I suppose his brain might be right where his heart would be. But it's the cold green metal of his face that I gaze up at, trying to imagine that day a hundred years agoâand trying to imagine the strange moment when that little box was first opened. They say the brain resembled a small piece of hardened black putty. Well, that's what they said nobody knows now. You see, pretty much everyone who handled Paine's brain died, from one cause or another, not many years after the ceremony. Moncure Conway, now a lonely old widower still struggling for the cause of peace, passed away in Paris in 1909. The junior Dr. Foote followed just a few years later. Despite his father's lifelong vegetarian and electromagnetic regimens for him, Junior had always been a curiously morose and sickly boy. He had not much outlived his father; though holding the senior Dr. Foote's cold fingers one last time, he was able to reach into the coffin and wrap his father's folded fingers around a copy of
Dr.
Foote's Home
Cyclopedia
of
Medical, Social and Sexual Science.
With his words clutched to his breast, the old doctor carried his works into the hereafter.
As do we all, I suppose.
I turn and look down the road back into townâthe road Paine once walked, the road that Cobbett raced away on, and that Foote rode eighty years later to gently return him. When I first began to trace the route of his bones, I was struck by the extraordinary coincidence of how they fell into the hands of activists for everything from abolition and women's rights to vegetarianism and pacifism. But that such people would place themselves in his path was no coincidence at all. Like saint's relics, Tom Paine has passed from one idealistic reformer to another over the years: his travels are those of democracy itself. Who else could have brought together a Manhattan physician, a Virginia minister, a Surrey farmer, and a London publisher? They always came back to that call to common senseâto our sense of rationality, of hope, of kindness-against tradition and fearful irrationality, against the dead authority of the past. And now they are the past themselves: we are the unseen future that they progressed toward, the inheritors of all the struggles they began.
Where is Tom Paine?
Reader, where is he not?
A Note on the Epigraph
But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?
Indeed.
The famed writer of
Religio Medici
spoke truer than he knew. In August 1840, workmen at the St. Peter Mancroft Church in Norwich were digging a grave in the chapel's chancel when a blow of the pickax rebounded from the earth with a mighty
crack.
The gravediggers leaned in to look at what they'd struck: it proved to be an ancient leaden coffin, its lid now badly fractured by the pickax. Atop that lid, and also split in half, was the brass plate that had been affixed to it:
Amplissimus Vir. Dns. Thomas Browne,
Miles, Medicinae, Dr. Annos Natus 77
Denatus 19 Die mensis Octobris, Anno. Dni. 1682,
hoc Loculo indormiens.
Corpis Spagyrici pulvere plumbum in aurum Convertit.
In the dim light of the chapel, they could see a skeleton through the fracture in the lid. It was the body of an aged but respectable gentleman, with but one tooth left in its head, and a fussy auburn wig was still draped about its skull. The remains of a beard was peppered atop the jaws and neck. The inscription was indeed for Sir Thomas Browneâfallen on his seventy-seventh birthday, according to one account of the time, having "dyed after eating too plentifully of a Venison Feast." The bones were to be properly reburied; now that they knew who it was, it was sacrilege to keep them aboveground any longer.
That's not quite what happened.
George Potter, the sexton and apparently a rather enterprising fellow, decided that the skull wouldn't be missed much by its former owner. Skulls were much in demand these days, after all, as medical men tried to keep up with advances in phrenology, and what better model of the shape of human genius than in the skull of Sir Browne? So, before reburying the final works of Thomas Browne, he, shall we say,
edited
them.
George first approached Dr. G.W.W. Frith at the Norwich Hospital, and offered him the grisly relic for sale; being the sort of respectable fellow with three initials in his name, the good doctor refused. But his colleague Dr. Edward Lubbock had rather fewer initials and fewer qualms, and thus became the proud possessor of Browne's skull. After a few years of fond gazing upon his find, in 1845 the doctor deposited it in the hospital's Pathological Museumâliterary genius, presumably, constituting a dread pathology. And there the story ended for a while: both the sticky-fingered sexton and the doctor died in 1847, taking to their graves any particular concern over Browne's skull.
It wasn't until 1893 that the church sat up and noticed that its most prized skull had been missing for some fifty-three years. It demanded it back from the hospital, whereupon the hospital's board met, gravely considered the matter, and answered: no. The skull was not, the board argued, a "mere curiosity"âwhy, it helped inspire visitors to the hospital
to
read Sir Thomas Browne.
One imagines this is why Browne's skull was loaned out to be posed and photographed sitting atop a stack of his own booksâa rather perverse twist on the notion of an author having a
body of work.
You can view this unnerving photo as the frontispiece in volume
Il
of Charles Sayle's edition of
The Works of Sir Thomas Browne
(1904): in it, the skull and jaw have been wired together in such a way as to keep the toothless jaw open at a rather jolly angle, as if old Sir Thomas was having a good laugh over the whole situation.
The skull was finally reinterred in 1922, along with an entry in the church register that drolly notes the deceased's age as "317 Years." The story lives on, though, in articles in the journal
Notes
and Queries
(the issues dated 28 July 1894 and 22 September 1894) and in the continuing research of James Eason at the University of Chicago, where he maintains a splendid Sir Thomas Browne's Skull Web page.
The End
In piecing together Paine's final days I was confionted by accounts of greatly varying trustworthiness. The standard account of Paine's life remains Moncure Conway's
Life
of Thomas Paine (1892)
and
Writings
of
Thomas Paine (1894).
Conway was able to meet some of Paine's friends and neighbors while they were still living, and brought a level of sheer dogged scholarship and fairness to the task that no previous biographer ever remotely approached. But there are sympathetic accounts by W. T. Sherwin
(Memoirs of the
Life
of
Thomas Paine,
1819)
and Thomas Clio Rickman
(The
Life
of
Thomas Paine, 1819).
Peter Eckler's later
Life
of
Thomas Paine (1892)
is useful for its accounts of Paine's contemporaries. It was from the fearless British radical publisher George Holyoakeâthe last man in Britain to be prosecuted for atheismâand his
1840
book
The
Life
of Thomas Paine
that we find a detailed debunking of some hostile accounts of Paine's dying days. He also helpfilly quotes the research of Gilbert Vale, as Vale's own corrective
Life
of
Thomas Paine
would not appear until
1853.
Vale's account includes a number of testimonies by those quoted in hostile accounts of Paine, and shows them either disowning their earlier statements or placing them in a less misleading context.
But even these debunkers can slip. Holyoake mentions "Amasa Woodsworth," and identifies him as an engineer who lived next door to Paine in his last days. But an examination of the
1810
New York Census Index finds an Amasa
Woodworth
(no
s)
living there. This reveals a rather less random pattern of friendships during Paine's final days than one might have previously thought, as
Woodworth
was involved in the development of Daniel French's oscillating steam engine, which French patented in
1809.
So much for friends: now for enemies. The first Paine biography, Francis Oldys's
Life of Thomas Pain, the Author of The Rights of Man,
With a Defense $His Writings
(London, 1791), was nothing of the sort: it was written by the scholar George Chalmers under a pseudonym, and very ingeniously mixed diligent research and newly discovered facts (it is to Chalmers that we owe most of our understanding of Paine's early life in Britain) with outright slander. A similar approach was adopted just weeks after Paine's death by James Cheetham for his 1809 biography
The
Life
of
Thomas Paine.
Cheetham and Paine were former colleagues who had turned bitter enemies; Paine was about to sue Cheetham for libel when he died, and Cheetham lost a separate libel suit over this book. But Chee-tham did indeed contact many of Paine's friends and neighbors, andâthough his quotations from them are utterly misleading his
identtfication
of the people and places frequented by Paine remain invaluable. Hostile biographies since thenâCobbett's edition of Oldys, for example, or John Harford's
Some Account
of
the
Life;,
Death, and Principles of Thomas Paine
(1819)-are almost
all
rehashings of Oldys and Cheetham.
I suppose you want to know about the drinking.
Sure, they all do. Whether Tom Paine was a drunk is a perennial concern of biographers. Cheetham made much of this in his hostile biography. Leaving aside whether it mattersâsince it doesn'eâI would guess that Paine was a social drinker most of his life, but that he did indeed drink heavily in his final years. Considering that he was dying in an age before painkillers, it's hard to see why he
shouldn't
have drunk heavily. The clearest evidence comes in a letter by Thomas Haynes, dated October 30,1807, and now in the Robert Hunter Correspondence file at the New York Public Library. (Elihu and Mary Palmer's letters about Paine are also in this file.) Haynes makes clear his anger over Cheetham's attacks and his regard for Paine while
also
noting Paine's drinking. The wording seems to indicate that this was a new development. Unlike Paine's print biographers, all of whom had an ax to grind for or against him, Haynes's letter is both private and by a friend of Paine's and thus far more believable.
It is also Haynes's letter that notes Walking Stewart's visit to New York City, and the fear that he had drowned in a shipwreck. In fact, Stewart survived and indeed prospered. After a period of povertyâThomas De Quincey hesitated to visit him at his quarters, because he didn't want the gracious Stewart to feel obliged to offer scarce tea or breadâStewart won a spectacular legal claim against the Nabob of Arcot in 1813. He recovered aL14,000 award that enabled him to live out his remaining years on Northumberland Street surrounded by a salon of literary and musical friends, and enjoying a massive organ he had installed in his apartment, which was the only instrument capable of blasting through his deafness. Stewart left an extraordinary collection of books and pamphlets in the British Library; my references were largely drawn from the entertainingly odd
Revelation of Nature
(1794). Stewart's life cries out for a scholar to write his biography, but until then the primary accounts come from
The Life and Adventures
of
the Celebrated Walking Stewart
(1822) and particularly the profile in volume
I11
of
The Collected
Writings of Thomas De Quincey
(1890).
For Paine's other great colorful friend of these years, see Harold E. Dickson's
John Wesley Jamis, American Painter
1780-1840:
With
a Checklist His Works
(1949). Jarvis was prolific, and a great many of his paintings turn up with dealers and museums; in fact, the same year Dickson published his book, the long-lost 1806/7 Jarvis portrait of Paine was discovered.
But Jarvis's cartoon of a Quaker abandoning Paine scarcely hinted at the tensions that Paine's awkward burial request played upon. H. Larry Ingle's
Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation
(1998), Henry Wilbur's
The Life and Labors of Elias Hicks
(1910), give a sense of how Paine's death came just as modern liberal Quakerism was coalescing, and Walt Whitman's "Notes (Such as They Are) Founded On Elias Hicks" appears in his 1888 newspaper column collection
November Bough.
Ironically, Elias Hicks also went to an unquiet grave: the
Niles Weekly Register
of April 10, 1830, reveals that an artist, unsuccessful in asking the Friends to take a death mask of Hicks, secretly exhumed him and made one. The Friends, suspicious when they saw the ground disturbed, dug Hicks up and found bits of plaster still stuck to his hair.
In describing the past dwellings of Paine in his final days, I was greatly helped by the
New York Times
archive. There are a number of hints about 309 Bleecker Street; ads for the Lee & Co. window screen company ran throughout the 1850s, a January 29, 1876, article on 'The Birthday of Thomas Paine" identifies it as "a beer and billiard saloon," and the February 28,1930, article "Old Home of Thomas Paine Faces Demolition" features a large AP photo of the old building in its final days. A mortgage notice from June 22, 1933, shows the building as still standing, but I believe it was demolished soon afterward. Of the old newspapers mentioned relating to Paine's death, the
United States Gazette for the Country
(June 12, 1809) can barely be bothered to mention him; while the Tontine House auction ad can be found on page 4 of the
New-York
Herald
for May 5, 1810.
Details of the life of Benjamin Lay can be found in Robert Vaux's
Memoirs of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford
(1815), and Lydia Marie Child's
Memoir of Benjamin Lay: Compiled ji-om Various
Sources,
published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1842. There's also a colorful account of Lay's "fake blood" antics in John Greenleaf Whittier's introduction to the 1871edition of
The Journal
of John Woolman.
Lay is a neglected figure these days, and the man surely warrants a modern biography.
And finally, for Paine's American beginnings, you can get some of the flavor of the Philadelphia of yore from George Barton's 1925
Little Journeys Around Old Philadeehia
and Christopher Morley's 1920
Travels in Philadeehia.
Do buy yourself some old prewar editions of Morley: they're charming, and always staggeringly cheapâoften priced in the single digits.