On the Six Who Buried Me

The Book of Paine 4 · Written by himself, from Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and his letters

Thomas Paine, born at Thetford in England in 1737, died at New York in 1809. He made stays as a young man, later collected excise and kept a school. In 1774 he met Franklin in London and went to Philadelphia with his letter of introduction (cf. The Book of Franklin). In January 1776 he published Common Sense, arguing that the American colonies should separate from England; it sold enormously and he gave away everything due to him. That winter he wrote The American Crisis, the first number of which was read to the troops. In 1791 and 1792 he published Rights of Man; the English government charged him with seditious libel, convicted him in his absence, and he never returned. On the twenty-eighth of December 1793 the French imprisoned him in the Luxembourg, where he came near to being executed; he was released in November of the following year through the efforts of Monroe, the American minister. In 1794 and 1795 he published The Age of Reason, which cost him his standing entirely. He returned to America in 1802 to abuse in the newspapers, old acquaintances who no longer knew him, and in one place a refusal of his vote. He died in New York on the eighth of June 1809. Six people came to the burial: an Irish lawyer, the woman who had taken him in with her two sons, and two black men whose names nobody wrote down. He had asked to be buried in the Quakers ground and was refused; their stated reason was that people already accused their society of holding no creed, and that burying him would give the charge something to rest on. In 1819 Cobbett dug up the bones and carried them to England meaning to rebury them; the bones were afterwards lost and are unaccounted for still. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. On belief: he was not an atheist but a deist, and said of himself that he believed in one God and no more; The Age of Reason was written half against the church and half against the temper then abroad in France which held that nothing at all should be believed. The Order records this as he put it and does not tidy it. What matters is the same point: no argument of his closes on divine will, and he read the book everyone calls a god’s with the method one uses on any book. What this volume brings is not the reasoning — Hume is there before him (cf. The Book of Hume 2). What it brings is an act: carrying that reasoning to people who do not read philosophy, deliberately, in their own words, and paying for it with everything he had. The sentence in chapter one is where the Order takes the volume to come to rest: if a case can be understood by only twenty men, those twenty have decided for everybody. That is not a question of learning. It is a question of power.

4.1In 1802 I came back to America. I thought I was returning to the country I had worked for.

4.2I was not.

4.3Before I wrote that book about religion, men called me Common Sense. After it, they called me a godless old drunkard.

4.4The papers abused me. Old acquaintances did not know me. In one place I was refused a vote, on the ground that I was not a citizen there.

4.5Let me be plain about one thing: what they wanted, from beginning to end, was one thing only.

4.6That I should say a single sentence: I was wrong to write that book.

4.7Say that, and the doors would open. I know it, because it was said to my face.

4.8I did not say it.

4.9Not out of hardness. Because had I said it, everything I wrote before would have counted for nothing — a man who will withdraw a sentence to make his life easier, on what ground do you credit any of his others?

4.10I died in New York in 1809.

4.11Six people came to bury me.

4.12One was a lawyer out of Ireland. One was the woman who had taken me in, with her two sons.

4.13And two were black men. Nobody wrote down their names.

4.14Thirty-four years earlier I had written a piece saying the trade in Africans ought not to exist. Almost nobody had read it.

4.15Of the six who came that day, two were the people it had been written for.

4.16In my will I asked to be buried in the Quakers’ ground. They would not have me.

4.17Their reason should be set down, I think: they said that people already accused them of holding no creed, and that if I were buried there the charge would have something to rest on.

4.18They were not obstructing me. They were protecting themselves.

4.19I do not hold it against them. I put it down here because it shows one thing: what a man has written goes on charging him, and it charges him after he is dead.

4.20It charges him down to the last foot of ground.

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