by Paul Collins
Out at the roadside is a rather ungainly obelisk to Paine. It started out in 1839 as a column erected by Paine's followers, and was duly defaced by locals; and then, in 1899, the bronze bust that Foote lobbied for finally got cast, and stuck atop the obelisk like an architectural afterthought. But the monument is as close as you can get to a grave site, I suppose, since you can't see Thomas Paine's original plot anymore. It's now under this bit of sidewalk, right by where steps descended toward Paine's cottage—which, of course, is itself no longer where it used to be. Come to think of it, even the memorial has moved around a bit: soon after the bust went up, another road-building project meant that the whole thing had to be dragged away, stuck in storage for years, and then put out here by the road.
Just up a small rise from the cottage is a 1920s colonial with oversized columns absurdly dominating its entrance. It doesn't quite look like a home, and yet . . . it sort of is. I can't even tell, walking up to it, whether it's inhabited at all until I see that a young boy, maybe nine years old, is in the vestibule. He is industriously yanking his boots off. He's missing the musket demonstration next door, but somehow I have the feeling he's seen quite a few of those by now.
I tap at the door, and he looks up calmly, not in the least bit startled.
"Hi," I say hesitantly. "Ahh . . . I'm looking for the Thomas Paine National Historical Association."
He nods nonchalantly, as if this was a question that every growing American boy gets asked by strangers at their doorstep.
"Okay." He starts up a staircase. "I'll go get my dad."
The spade sits in a corner of the room, still waiting its next use—for another building, perhaps, or for digging a sewage ditch out in Tivoli.
"That's Edison's shovel," explains Brian McCartin, gesturing around the exhibit hall that we stand in. 'When they broke ground for this building in 1925, they had Edison break ground for it. He was the vice president of the association by then."
I nod as he keeps talking; there's an old black-and-white photo of the inventor leaning on the shovel, probably standing just a few feet from where we are now.
"Anyway, what I was saying before is, Paine was the connection between the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century Progressives . . ." McCartin continues.
Brian's got the build of a linebacker, and speaks with a Bronx accent. He actually lives in this museum, in quarters with his wife and son up on the second floor. The house has always been something of a refuge for New Yorkers, I guess; for a long time the tenant was Robert Emmet Owen, an American Impressionist painter who back in 1941 simply up and sold his Madison Avenue gallery and moved in here to guard Paine's legacy. Every decade or two, another keeper of the Paine relics takes a turn living and growing old here, waiting to pass it on to the next guardian.
Here is the inkwell Paine used to write Common Sense; over there are his spectacles, stylishly thin and back in fashion after two centuries; here is his tattered wallet and some change. It's stuff you might expect to have found on the nightstand as he died, or perhaps left atop clothes folded for the morning.
". . . And he remained probably the most important reformer of the time, at least until Marx . . ." Brian keeps talking.
I occasionally take a step backward as he talks, and McCartin takes a step forward; and in this manner we complete nearly an entire orbit around the exhibit hall, past an exhibit of Paine's design for smokeless wax candles—bought many years later by Moncure Conway—near the pieces of Paine's tombstone found in Mrs. Badeau's tavern wall, and past the time-blackened death mask that Jarvis once molded with his fingers across Paine's unseeing face. The nose is crooked, like a boxer's: the weight of the plaster, they say. But the effect is to make him look every bit as pugnacious in his person as he was in his writing.
"Now, the common rap against Paine is that he was atheist. He was in fact a Theist . . ." Brian monologues. I keep nodding. We pass a display of Conder tokens, coins minted by British businesses in the late 1700s,because their government was too broke and stingy to issue its own metal currency, citizens could design them however they liked, and amused themselves by issuing currency showing Paine dangling from a gallows over the legend "The End of Pain." Imagine traveling back to Britain and finding the very coins in your pocket calling for your death.
". . . and so . . . ,"Brian is finishing his speech, and then pauses to cough and sneeze. "Sorry. Ugh. Ahh . . . What, what was your question again?"
I think back, and realize my question had been: "Hi, my name is Pad "
He breathes in to start another disquisition on eighteenth-century economics, and I blurt out: "I'm here about E. B. Foote."
His eyebrows go up.
"Dr. Foote?"
"Yes." I nod vigorously, suddenly excited. There is another living person who knows about this man. "Dr. Foote. And Moncure Conway. See . . . I'm actually here about the early history of the Association itself."
"Really?"
"Very much so."
His volubility is suddenly gone. He is looking at me as if realizing that he has no idea who on earth has walked into his museum.
"Maybe . . . maybe we should have a seat." He motions me to a table at the back of the exhibition hall. 'What can I tell you?"
I look at the table a moment. It might well have come from Foote's old mansion. I wonder if this is where Foote and Conway themselves once sat? Where Foote unwrapped the package that . . .
"Well, I've been researching Conway and Foote." I pull some of their books and notes out of my bag, and riffle through them. "Following them around. I went to Foote's old mansion on Lexington Avenue, which I gather is where the Association's first meetings were held . . ."
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, then—see, I came across this . . . uh . . ."
I dig through my notes.
"This old newspaper story. About a burial cerem—"
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 monument—that awkward combination of a bust atop an obelisk—and 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'—the doctor looked out over the crowd—"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 ago—and 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 town—the 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 sense—to 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?
(ELSEWHERE)
Further Reading
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 Browne—fallen 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 w
orks 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 Museum—literary 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"—why, 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 books—a 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 Holyoake—the last man in Britain to be prosecuted for atheism—and 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.