Let dusky Sally henceforth bear Tom Pain may be when drunk, sir Which once was call'd a Skunk, sir. And when the wilderness shall yield (4) A nobler victory than men; While all our heads are swimming, True-Tom and Joël now, no more And work, by butchery and blood, Yet, still we can turn inside out Old Nature's Constitution, Mr. MATTHEWS Communicated the following paper: THOMAS PAINE AND THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. In a work printed in 1809 Stephen C. Carpenter wrote of Jefferson that "to him the credit of drawing up the Declaration of Independence has been, perhaps more generally than truly, given by the public." A statement like this, found in payment for his tuition, appears so modest and reasonable, that we should make no objection, were it not that the wages must be deducted from the scanty pittance of poor Columbus. He has already been so grossly defrauded by the name of this hemisphere, that we cannot hear with patience a proposal to strip him of that trifling substitute of a river, which had so late and so recently been bestowed upon him. We invite the attention of the reader to the rare modesty of Mr. Barlow himself, who, in committing this spoliation upon the fame of Columbus, does not even allow him the chance of an adjudication, . . but undertakes, by self-created authority, to make proclamation for the whole nation, and to pronounce the decree for all ages! (4) "Victory over the wilderness, which is more interesting, than that over men."-Barlow's Toast at the Dinner. 1 Memoirs of Jefferson, 1. 11. In the Menzies Catalogue (p. 66), prepared by Sabin in 1875, is quoted a passage from some source not specified from which the following extract is taken: A small number of copies I think twenty - were bound, and one of them was brought to the late Samuel M. Hopkins, then a young lawyer in Auburn, a work so libellous, it is said, that neither printer nor publisher dared put his name on the titlepage, and of which all but about twenty copies are alleged to have been suppressed, is too vague for serious discussion. Within the past few years, however, attempts have been made to show that Thomas Paine had a hand in the actual drafting of the Declaration. In 1899 Ellery Sedgwick wrote: Paine was now a marked man to those who knew the authorship of Common Sense; and Jefferson, whose intimacy with him dates from this time, seems to have sought his advice concerning the language of the instrument. There is little evidence to show that words of Paine's were actually incorporated by Jefferson; but his influence appeared in a fine passage of the preliminary draft denouncing slavery. This clause was born before its time, and did not live in the Declaration of Independence.1 In an interesting article called "To the Memory of Thomas. Paine," which has appeared within a year in a London paper, the writer said, "But modern sceptics who contemn the abstract idealism of the man who helped to draft the Declaration of Independence must not be permitted to deceive us."? Still more recently Mr. James M. Dow of Liverpool has spoken of "Thomas Paine, who, students now admit, was joint author of the American Declaration of Independence." 3 Finally, in a letter to the present writer dated December 26, 1909, Mr. Dow asserts that "in this country," that is, Eng N. Y., for his opinion. Mr. Hopkins dipped into the book; read some twenty or thirty pages here and there; and informed the printer that "he found, on the average, a libel to every page." On this the memoir was suppressed. The Samuel M. Hopkins (1772-1837) referred to was apparently living in New York City in 1809, and seems never to have lived at Auburn, though his son (1813-1901) of the same name was long a professor in the Auburn Theological Seminary. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1832 and printed in 1898 in the Publications of the Rochester Historical Society, 11. 1-42, the elder Hopkins does not mention the incident narrated above. Mr. Worthington C. Ford informs me that Carpenter's book is by no means so rare as the statements in auction catalogues indicate. 1 Life of Thomas Paine, 22. 2 The Nation, London, May 8, 1909, v. 189. 3 Notes and Queries, July 17, 1909, 10th Series, XII. 44. The substance of the present paper was printed in Notes and Queries of December 4, 1909, 10th Series, XII. 441-443. In his note to me of December 26, 1909, Mr. Dow says that " After inquiring into the facts about the Declaration of Independence, I have come to the conclusion that you are correct in ascribing its sole authorship to Jefferson." See also Notes and Queries of January 15, 1910, 53. land, "the opinion is wide-spread that Paine was co-author' of the Declaration. We are all familiar with the well-known tendency of a biographer to "claim everything" if I may be allowed the expression on behalf of the person whose life he is writing; and with the way in which a proposition, put forward as possible, is soon regarded as probable, and finally emerges as a certainty. Is not the latter illustrated in these remarks? Mr. Sedgwick merely suggests that Paine's "influence" appeared in a passage of the preliminary draft a passage, be it noted, not adopted; the anonymous writer declares that Paine "helped to draft" the Declaration; while Mr. Dow boldly calls Paine the "joint author" of the Declaration. That Paine's "Common Sense," published January 9, 1776,1 exerted a remarkable influence in favor of independence was freely admitted by Paine's contemporaries, and has since been universally acknowledged by historians; but that Paine had any share in the actual drafting of the Declaration of Independence is a totally different matter. Neither of the above. writers brings forward any proof in support of his proposition; but there can be no doubt that all three hark back to Moncure D. Conway. In 1892 Conway said that "the Declaration embodied every principle he [Paine] had been asserting, and indeed Cobbett is correct in saying that whoever may have written the Declaration Paine was its author "2; and that Paine's "first pamphlet ['Common Sense'] had dictated the Declaration of Independence." 3 It will be observed that these two passages are capable of a double interpretation : they may refer to the Declaration as a document, or to the Declaration as an historical event. But however interpreted, Conway's own statement and that attributed by him to Cobbett ale alike preposterous. Elsewhere in the same 1 The date usually given is January 10, 1776, because the pamphlet was advertised in the Pennsylvania Journal of that date. But an advertisement dated "Philadelphia, January 9, 1776" was inserted in the Pennsylvania Evening Post of January 9, 1776 (11. 15), which begins, "THIS day was published, and is now selling by Robert Bell, in Third-street (price two shillings) COMMON SENSE addressed to the INHABITANTS of AMERICA, on the following interesting SUBJECTS." Attention was called to this advertisement, though it was not quoted, in Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution, 1. 469 note. 2 Life of Paine, 1. 81; 3 I. 91. 4 Where Cobbett makes this statement, I do not know. It is not in his Life of Paine, published in 1796, nor in Thomas Paine: a Sketch of his Life and work Conway attempts to be more precise, for, referring to the period between June 7 and July 1, 1776, he says: At this juncture Paine issued one of his most effective pamphlets, "A Dialogue between the Ghost of General Montgomery, Just Arrived from the Elysian Fields, and an American Delegate, in a Wood near Philadelphia." . . . The allusion to the arming of negroes and Indians against America, and other passages, resemble clauses in one of the paragraphs eliminated from the original Declaration of Independence. At this time Paine saw much of Jefferson, and there can be little doubt that the anti-slavery clause struck out of the Declaration was written by Paine, or by some one who had Paine's anti-slavery essay before him. In the following passages it will be observed that the antitheses are nearly the same "infidel and Christian," "heathen and Christian." PARAGRAPH STRUCK OUT OF THE DECLARATION. He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a THOMAS PAINE. - these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English, etc. an hight of outrage that seems left by Heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christians. - that barbarous and hellish power which has stirred up the Character, written jointly in 1819 by Cobbett and Madame Bonneville and first printed in Conway's Life of Paine, 11. 433-459. Very likely it will be found somewhere in Cobbett's Political Register, for in the issue of December 11, 1819, Cobbett employed this exaggerated language: Divested of all its minor circumstances, the great question was, whether the colonists would submit to taxation without representation; whether they would submit to be taxed, either directly or indirectly, by a Parliament to which they sent no Members, or whether they would not. A little thing sometimes produces a good effect; an insult offered to a man of great talent and unconquerable perseverance has in many instances, produced, in the long run, most tremendous effects; and, it appears to me very clear that some beastly insults, offered to Mr. Paine, while he was in the Excise in England, was the real cause of the Revolu tion in America; for, though the nature of the cause of America was such as I have before described it; though the principles were firm in the minds of the people of that country; still, it was Mr. Paine, and Mr. Paine alone, who brought those principles into action (xxxv. 420–422). market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another. Indians and Negroes to destroy us; Thus did Paine try to lay at the corner the stone which the builders rejected, and which afterwards ground their descendants to powder.1 The passage from Conway contains two distinct statements. First, that "at this time Paine saw much of Jefferson." Conway offers no proof of this, and, so far as I am aware, none exists. Paine arrived at Philadelphia in December, 1774,2 at 1 Life of Paine, 1. 79–81. 2 The date given by Conway (Life of Paine, 1. 40) and by Tyler (Literary History of the American Revolution, 1. 452), perhaps following Conway, is November 30, 1774. I do not know the authority for that date; but I am able to adduce a new piece of evidence. Paine's Common Sense was attacked in a series of articles signed "Cato," written by the Rev. Dr. William Smith of the Philadel phia College (now the University of Pennsylvania). Paine replied in several articles under the signature of "The Forester." In a letter dated April 28, 1776, John Adams said, "The writer of Common Sense' and 'The Forester' is the same person, His name is Paine, a gentleman about two years ago from England, a man who, General Lee says, has genius in his eyes. . . 'Cato' is reported here to be Doctor Smith - a match for Brattle" (Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife, 167). Adams's "about two years ago " is incorrect. In an autobiographical sketch sent Henry Laurens on January 14, 1779, Paine said, "I brought with me letters from Dr. Franklin. These letters were with a flying seal, that I might, if I thought proper, close them with a wafer. One was to Mr. Bache of this city. The terms of Dr. Franklin's recommendation were 'a worthy, ingenious, etc.' . . . I came some months before Dr. Franklin, and waited here for his arrival" (Writings, IV. 430). Franklin's letter to Bache, dated London, September 30, 1774, is printed in Bigelow's edition of Franklin's Works, v. 369-370. A letter by Paine to Franklin dated March 4, 1775, gives an "Ac. count of his wretched trip across the ocean; six weeks on shore before he was well enough to wait on Mr. Bache" (Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 1. 168. An extract from the letter is printed in Bigelow's edition of |