* "He dined at my table," said Aaron Burr. "I always
considered Mr. Paine a gentleman, a pleasant companion, and
a good-natured and intelligent man; decidedly temperate,
with a proper regard for his personal appearance, whenever I
have seen him." (Quoted in The Beacon, No. 30, May, 1837.)
"In his dress." says Joel Barlow, "he was generally very
cleanly, though careless, and wore his hair queued with side
curls, and powdered, like a gentleman of the old French
School. His manners were easy and gracious, his knowledge
universal."
Paine was prodigal of snuff, but used tobacco in no other form. He had aversion to profanity, and never told or listened to indecent anecdotes.
With regard to the charges of excessive drinking made against Paine, I have sifted a vast mass of contrarious testimonies, and arrived at the following conclusions. In earlier life Paine drank spirits, as was the custom in England and America; and he unfortunately selected brandy, which causes alcoholic indigestion, and may have partly produced the oft-quoted witness against him—his somewhat red nose. His nose was prominent, and began to be red when he was fifty-five. That was just after he had been dining a good deal with rich people in England, and at public dinners. During his early life in England (1737—1774) no instance of excess was known, and Paine expressly pointed the Excise Office to his record. "No complaint of the least dishonesty or intemperance has ever appeared against me." His career in America (1774-1787) was free from any suspicion of intemperance. John Hall's daily diary while working with Paine for months is minute, mentioning everything, but in no case is a word said of Paine's drinking. This was in 1785-7. Paine's enemy, Chalmers ("Oldys"), raked up in 1791 every charge he could against Paine, but intemperance is not included. Paine told Rickman that in Paris, when borne down by public and private affliction, he had been driven to excess. That period I have identified on a former page (ii., p. 59) as a few weeks in 1793, when his dearest friends were on their way to the guillotine, whither he daily expected to follow them. After that Paine abstained altogether from spirits, and drank wine in moderation. Mr. Lovett, who kept the City Hotel, New York, where Paine stopped in 1803 and 1804 for some weeks, wrote a note to Caleb Bingham, of Boston, in which he says that Paine drank less than any of his boarders. Gilbert Vale, in preparing his biography, questioned D. Burger, the clerk of Pelton's store at New Rochelle, and found that Paine's liquor supply while there was one quart of rum per week. Brandy he had entirely discarded. He also questioned Jarvis, the artist, in whose house Paine resided in New York (Church Street) five months, who declared that what Cheetham had reported about Paine and himself was entirely false. Paine, he said, "did not and could not drink much." In July, 1809, just after Paine's death, Cheetham wrote Barlow for information concerning Paine, "useful in illustrating his character," and said: "He was a great drunkard here, and Mr. M., a merchant of this city, who lived with him when he was arrested by order of Robespierre, tells me he was intoxicated when that event happened." Barlow, recently returned from Europe, was living just out of Washington; he could know nothing of Cheetham's treachery, and fell into his trap; he refuted the story of "Mr. M.," of course, but took it for granted that a supposed republican editor would tell the truth about Paine in New York, and wrote of the dead author as having "a mind, though strong enough to bear him up and to rise elastic under the heaviest hand of oppression, yet unable to endure the contempt of his former friends and fellow-laborers, the rulers of the country that had received his first and greatest services; a mind incapable of looking down with serene compassion, as it ought, on the rude scoffs of their imitators, a new generation that knows him not; a mind that shrinks from their society, and unhappily seeks refuge in low company, or looks for consolation in the sordid, solitary bottle, etc."! Barlow, misled as he was, well knew Paine's nature, and that if he drank to excess it was not from appetite, but because of ingratitude and wrong. The man was not a stock or a stone. If any can find satisfaction in the belief that Paine found no Christian in America so merciful as rum, they may perhaps discover some grounds for it in a brief period of his sixty-ninth year. While living in the house of Carver, Paine was seized with an illness that threatened to be mortal, and from which he never fully recovered. It is probable that he was kept alive for a time by spirits during the terrible time, but this ceased when in the latter part of 1806 he left Carver's to live with Jarvis. In the spring of 1808 he resided in the house of Mr. Hitt, a baker, in Broome Street, and there remained ten months. Mr. Hitt reports that Paine's weekly supply then—his seventy-second year, and his last—was three quarts of rum per week.
* Todd's "Joel Barlow," p. 236. The "Mr. M." was one
Murray, an English speculator in France, where he never
resided with Paine at all.
After Paine had left Carver's he became acquainted with more people. The late Judge Tabor's recollections have been sent me by his son, Mr. Stephen Tabor, of Independence, Iowa.
"I was an associate editor of the New York Beacon with Col. John Fellows, then (1836) advanced in years, but retaining all the vigor and fire of his manhood. He was a ripe scholar, a most agreeable companion, and had been the correspondent and friend of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams, under all of whom he held a responsible office. One of his productions was dedicated, by permission, to [J. Q.] Adams, and was republished and favorably received in England. Col. Fellows was the soul of honor and inflexible in his adherence to truth. He was intimate with Paine during the whole time he lived after returning to this country, and boarded for a year in the same house with him.
"I also was acquainted with Judge Hertell, of New York City, a man of wealth and position, being a member of the New York Legislature, both in the Senate and Assembly, and serving likewise on the judicial bench. Like Col. Fellows, he was an author, and a man of unblemished life and irreproachable character.
"These men assured me of their own knowledge derived from constant personal intercourse during the last seven years of Paine's life, that he never kept any company but what was entirely respectable, and that all accusations of drunkenness were grossly untrue. They saw him under all circumstances and knew that he was never intoxicated. Nay, more, they said, for that day, he was even abstemious. That was a drinking age and Paine, like Jefferson, could 'bear but little spirit,' so that he was constitutionally temperate.
"Cheetham refers to William Carver and the portrait painter Jarvis. I visited Carver, in company with Col. Fellows, and naturally conversed with the old man about Paine. He said that the allegation that Paine was a drunkard was altogether without foundation. In speaking of his letter to Paine which Cheetham published, Carver said that he was angry when he wrote it and that he wrote unwisely, as angry men generally do; that Cheetham obtained the letter under false pretenses and printed it without authority.
"Col. Fellows and Judge Hertell visited Paine throughout the whole course of his last illness. They repeatedly conversed with him on religious topics and they declared that he died serenely, philosophically and resignedly. This information I had directly from their own lips, and their characters were so spotless, and their integrity so unquestioned, that more reliable testimony it would be impossible to give."