Pac-Pal: Packard through Palmer

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


PACKARD, Charles, Lancaster, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Manager, 1842-44.


PACKARD, Theodore, Shelburn, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1836-40.


PADELFORD, Seth, 1807-1878, political leader, statesman, abolitionist.  31st Governor of Rhode Island.  Worked with New England Emigrant Aid Society, which aided anti-slavery settlers in Kansas.  Member of Republican Party.  Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island, 1863-1865, Governor in 1869-1873.


PAGE, John, 1743-1808, statesman, soldier.  Member of Congress from Virginia.  Served in Congress March 1789-March 1797.  Governor of Virginia, 1802.  Opposed slavery as Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 624; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 137-138; Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808). Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901, p. 93; Annals of Congress). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 137-138:

PAGE, JOHN (April 17, 1743 o.s.-October 11, 1808), Revolutionary patriot, congressman, governor of Virginia, was born at "Rosewell," the great house built in Gloucester County by his grandfather, Mann Page [q. v.]. He was the son of Mann and Alice (Grymes) Page and thus represented an alliance of two of the dominant families in Tidewater Virginia. He gave to his grandmother, Judith (Carter) Page, the credit for whetting his appetite for reading and stimulating his inquisitive mind. When nine years old he was put in the grammar-school of the Reverend William Yates with some dozen sons of neighboring planters. The arid training he had there was little to his liking, and after a year a private tutor was engaged for him. When he was thirteen he entered the grammar-school at the College of William and Mary and continued there until 1763, when he finished the regular course in the philosophy schools. At William and Mary he and Thomas Jefferson became fast friends, sharing their ideas and their confidences. Their correspondence spanned fifty years with not a discord in its friendly harmony. It was to him that Jefferson wrote the letters that reveal his youthful romance with the "fair Belinda," Rebecca Burwell who was so soon to marry Jacquelin Ambler (Ford, post, I, 342, 357). Of his friend, Jefferson declared thirty years later to Albert Gallatin that he loved him as a brother (Ibid., VIII, 85). About 1765 Page married Frances, the daughter of Robert Carter Burwell of Isle of Wight County. They had twelve children, five of whom were married to sons and daughters of Thomas Nelson [q.v.]. In 1789 Page married in New York City, Margaret, the daughter of William Lowther of Scotland, who bore him eight children. For a time he was president of the Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, at Williamsburg, a group that sought to play the role of the Royal Society of London in Virginia. With his friend David Jameson he was interested in astronomy and made experiments in measuring the fall of rain and dew. His friends called him "John Partridge" because of his astronomical pursuits, especially in calculating an eclipse of the sun. He confessed in later years that he did not think he had made great proficiency in any study for he was too sociable to shut himself off in solitude for study as did his friend, Jefferson (Autobiography, post, p. 151). He followed the fortunes of the Anglican Church with zeal and such devotion that he was suggested by certain of his friends as the first bishop of Virginia. In his religious convictions he was orthodox, and he opposed on many occasions the free thinking of certain of his fellow Virginians. In 1785 he was a lay delegate from Virginia to the convention of his church in New York.

In politics he began his career as a member of the colonial House of Burgesses under the patronage of his kinsmen, the Nelsons, and he had the favor of the governors, Botetourt and Dunmore. When the tide of Revolutionary sentiment rose he helped to direct its flow as a member of the Council and the Committee of Public Safety and then as lieutenant-governor under Patrick Henry. He was a member of the convention that framed the constitution for Virginia in 1776. He served in a military capacity in the Yorktown campaign and contributed of his private means to the Revolutionary funds. In the election for governor of Virginia in 1779 he ran a close second to his friend Jefferson, but this political matching was not allowed to strain the constancy of their friendship (see Ford, post, II, 188). After the Revolution he represented Gloucester in most sessions of the Virginia Assembly until 1789 when he went to -Congress. He sat in that hotly until 1797 when, as he said, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton shut him out (Autobiography, post, p. 150). With James Madison, 1749-1812 [q.v.], and others he represented Virginia in determining the boundary between Pennsylvania and Virginia in 1784. He waged an active campaign for Jefferson. in 1800. In 1802 he succeeded James Monroe as governor of Virginia and served three successive terms in that office. In the closing years of his life he held the office of commissioner of loans, a federal office to which his friend Jefferson appointed him, recognizing his need of an office with a salary but fearing to place him in a position where his too little discriminating trust in his fellowmen might bring woe to him.

The care of a family of twenty children, the maintenance of the princely mansion of "Rosewell" and his sociable rather than business inclinations brought Page in his later years to a decline in fortunes. In 1786 he had been the largest slave owner in Abingdon Parish in Gloucester County, counting his black people to the number of 160. On his death at the age of sixty-four he was buried in the yard of St. John's Church at Richmond, where many of the stirring scenes of the Revolution took place. His own estimate of his life was that it had been a life devoted to liberty.

[Letters and photostats in Archives of University of Virginia, and Archives of American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; brief autobiography in Virginia Historical Register, July 1850, and in Meade, post, I, p. 147; The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by P. L. Ford, volumes I, II, IV, VII-IX (1892-98); Executive Journal of the Council of Colonial Virginia, volumes III, IV (1928-30); American Historical Review, July 1896; Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, July 1893, July 1896, October 1897, October 1902, October 19II; Wm. and Mary College Quarterly, January 1896, pp. 200-01, October 1896, April 1916; Wm. Meade, Old Churches ... of Virginia (2 volumes, 1861); R. A. Lancaster, Historic Virginia Homes and Churches (1915); R. C. M. Page, Genealogy of the Page Family in Virginia (1883); Richmond Enquirer, October 14, 1808.]

M. H. W.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 624:

PAGE, John, governor of Virginia, born at Rosewell, Gloucester county, Virginia, 17 April, 1744; died in Richmond, Virginia, 11 October, 1808, was graduated in 1763 at William and Mary, where he was the associate and intimate friend of Thomas Jefferson, of whom he was a follower in polities afterward. He was with Washington in one of his western expeditions against the French and Indians. Afterward he was a representative in the Virginia house of burgesses and a member of the colonial council. In 1776 he was a visitor of the College of William and Mary. In the same year he was a delegate to the convention that framed the Virginia state constitution. During the Revolutionary struggle he rendered important services as a member of the committee of public safety, and as lieutenant-governor of the commonwealth, contributing from his fortune to the public cause. He was an officer for the county of Gloucester during the war, where he raised a regiment of militia to repel a British invasion. He also contributed freely from his private fortune to the public cause. There is still in existence a letter from Edmund Pendleton urging Governor Page to accept payment for the lead taken from Rosewell for making bullets. He was elected one of the earliest Representatives in congress from Virginia, upon the adoption of the Federal constitution, and was re-elected three times, serving from 4 March, 1789, till 3 March, 1797. In 1800 he was chosen one of the electors for president, and in December, 1802, was made governor of Virginia, succeeding James Monroe. After serving three years he was followed by William Cabell, as the state constitution at that time did not permit the same person to hold the office more than three years in succession, and was soon appointed by President Jefferson U. S. commissioner of loans for Virginia, which office he held at the time of his death. Governor Page published “Addresses to the People” (1796 and 1799). He was distinguished for his theological learning, as well as for his soldierly and statesman-like qualities, and at one time his friends desired him to take holy orders in order to become the first bishop of Virginia. There is a portrait of him executed in 1758 by Benjamin West, also a later one by Charles W. Peale. Governor Page preserved many letters from leaders of the Revolution, and left these and other material for memoirs of his time. These papers were lost after his death, but many of them were recovered in Boston in 1887. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 624.


PAGE, Simon, Hallowell, Maine, Church Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1861-64.


PAINE, Armancy, Providence, Rhode Island, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1844-1846.


PAINE, Byron (October 10, 1827-January 13, 1871), advocate of state rights in Wisconsin. He and his father both held the anti-slavery views prevalent at the time on the Western Reserve of Ohio and were sympathetic with the angry protest against the enactment of the Fugitive-slave Law in 1850.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 145-146:

PAINE, BYRON (October 10, 1827-January 13, 1871), advocate of state rights in Wisconsin, judge, the son of James H. and Marilla (Paine) Paine, was born in Painesville, Ohio, founded by his mother's grandfather, Edward Paine, a Revolutionary officer from Connecticut. An academy at Painesville gave him his formal schooling, which was later supplemented by wide reading, the acquisition of the German language, and the literary training that is afforded by practice in writing for the press. Removing with his father, who was a practising lawyer, to Wisconsin Territory in the year before its admission as a state, he studied law and was admitted to the bar at Milwaukee in 1849. In the early years of his professional career, when clients were few, he did much writing for the Free Democrat, a free-soil newspaper at Milwaukee. He and his father both held the anti-slavery views prevalent at the time on the Western Reserve of Ohio and were sympathetic with the flame of angry protest against the enactment of the Fugitive-slave Law in 1850. In 1854 he appeared before the state supreme court as counsel for Sherman M. Booth, the editor of the newspaper to which he had contributed, when the rescue of a negro, Joshua Glover, involved Booth in criminal proceedings. Paine's argument for the granting. of a writ of habeas corpus was mainly an attack on the constitutionality of the Fugitive-slave Law (Unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Act. Argument in the Matter of the Petition of Sherman M. Booth for a Writ of Habeas Corpus, n.d.). The state court granted the writ, but renewed efforts of the federal authorities ended, in 1859, with the decision of the federal Supreme Court upholding the right of the federal authorities to try Booth. Paine expressed in no uncertain terms his own belief in state sovereignty, and the defiance of the federal authorities voiced by the Wisconsin judges and by him was received with acclamation among anti-slavery men everywhere. He reaped a rich harvest of personal popularity in his own state, which culminated in his election, the spring of 1859, as associate justice of the state supreme court on a campaign platform, remarkable in Wiscons in history, of "State Rights and Byron Paine!" Carl Schurz, then a citizen of "Wisconsin, came under the spell. Years afterward the figure of young Paine, whose "tall and sturdy frame, and his face, not regular of feature, but beautiful in its expression of absolute sincerity, kindness, and intelligence, made his very appearance a picture of strength ruled by reason, justice, and benevolence," remained a cherished memory in Schurz's recollections (Schurz, post, p. I 12). Nevertheless, in 1861, when Lincoln called for men and resources to defend the Union, no state responded more heartily than Wisconsin. In November 1864 Paine resigned from the bench and was appointed lieutenant-colonel of the 43rd Wisconsin Volunteers. The next May he resumed his law practice in Milwaukee. In 1867 he was reappointed to a seat on the state supreme bench, to which he was later elected and on which he served until his death. In two opinions, of 1869 and 1870, he made the effort to analyze and set forth the convictions he continued to hold concerning state rights and to point out wherein he understood they differed from the doctrine of the right of secession (Knorr vs. The Home Insurance Company and In re Tarble, 25 Wisconsin Reports, 150-66 and 394-413). The close reasoning and keen exposition of these opinions commanded the respect of his fellow judges and lawyers, most of whom had come wholly to disagree with his view of the once dominant issue. It is noteworthy that a man raised to a judicial station by a popular movement, without regard to his professional qualifications, should have won the confidence and respect of the bar so completely. He was survived by his wife Clarissa R. (Wyman) Paine, whom he had married on October 7, 1854, and by their four sons.

["Death of Mr. Justice Paine," 27 Wisconsin Reports, 23- 68; J. R. Berryman, History of the Bench and Bar in Wisconsin (1898), volume I; P. M. Reed, The Bench and Bar of Wisconsin (1882); C. W. Butterfield, History of Dane County, Wisconsin (1880); J. B. Winslow, The Story of a Great Court (1912); The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, volume II (1907); E. E. Bryant, "The Supreme Court of Wisconsin," Green Bag, March 1897; Chart No. 3, Showing Ancestry of Descendants of General Edward Paine, comp. by J. L. Paine (1902); Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), January 14, 16, 18, 1871.]

W.B.S.


PAINE, Elijah (January 21, 1757-April 28, 1842), jurist, farmer, manufacturer, and jurist. United States Senator, 1795-1801.  Vice-President, American Colonization Society (ACS), 1840-41.  For many years he was president of the Vermont Colonization Society, to which, and also to other benefactions, he contributed generously.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 148:

PAINE, ELIJAH (January 21, 1757-April 28, 1842), farmer, manufacturer, and jurist, was a native of Brooklyn, Connecticut, the second of eight children born to Seth and Mabel (Tyler) Paine. His ancestors, of English descent on both sides, had long resided in New England. Financial difficulties delayed his preparation for college. He was studying under the direction of his uncle, Reverend John Paine of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, when in September 1776 he decided to join the Revolutionary army. Military life, however, especially garrison duty at Fort Washington, New York, proved uninteresting, and the war promised to drag on indefinitely; accordingly young Paine shortly returned to his studies. In the fall of 1777 he entered Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1781. His high standing is indicated by his nomination in 1782 as first orator by the newly founded chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and his election as its president in 1783. Meanwhile, he had begun to study law in Boston, under Benjamin Lincoln, and in 1784 was admitted to the bar.

Seeking a place to establish himself, he followed the trend of migration northward to Vermont, pushing deep into the backwoods. With a few friends he made the first settlement at Williamstown during the summer of 1784. Here he cleared a large farm. Here, too, and also in the neighboring township of Northfield, he built saw and grist mills. He was by nature a man of affairs, quick to see a profit, hard at a bargain, punctual in fulfilling his obligations, and equally exacting with others. A stern, masterful man, six feet tall and strongly built, with a powerful voice, he had the initiative, energy, and executive ability which on a broader stage would have made him a captain of industry. In early Vermont he became a farmer on a large scale, a breeder of animals of many sorts, leading the way in popularizing merino sheep. By 1812 he had a flock of 1500 head. Then with characteristic energy he built in Northfield a large woollen mill, where he produced flannels and broadcloth s. Already, in 1803, he had constructed a turnpike connecting his district to the capital at Montpelier. In 1825 he became the first president of the Bank of Montpelier.

Meanwhile he was taking an active part in politics. Only two years after his arrival in Vermont he was a member and secretary of the constitutional convention of 1786. From 1787 to 1790 he was in the lower house of the state legislature. He served thereafter as judge of probate in the. Randolph district (1788-91); as justice of the state supreme court (1791-93); as United States senator (1795-1801); as judge of the United States district court for Vermont, under one of Adams' "midnight" appointments (1801-42); and simultaneously as postmaster of his village (1815-42). He early aligned himself with the Federalists. He voted for the ratification of the Jay treaty, though at the cost of some unpopularity at home. In general he seems to have carried out his public duties with ability, but neither in Washington nor on the bench in Vermont did he leave any particular mark. As a judge he was known rather for strict discipline than for deep learning.

Throughout his life he was an ardent supporter of education. He endeavored in vain to have the state university located at Williamstown, but that his interest was not merely that of a real-estate promoter is evidenced by his long and active service as trustee of that institution, and of Middlebury and Dartmouth colleges as well. He took a prominent part in the affairs of the last named, being an aggressive leader of the anti-Wheelock faction in 1815 and thereafter (J. K. Lord, A History of Dartmouth College, 1913). He was honored by membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society. For many years he was president of the Vermont Colonization Society, to which, and also to other benefactions, he contributed generously. He married, June 7, 1790, Sarah Porter of Plymouth, New Hampshire. By her he had eight children; two of his sons were Charles and Martyn [qq.v.].

[Manuscript sketch of His father by Martyn Paine in the library of the University of Vermont; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); John Gregory, Centennial Proceedings and Historical Incidents of the Early Settlers of Northfield, Vermont (1878); J. M. Comstock, A List of the Principal Civil Officers of Vermont from I777 to I9I8 (1918); A. M. Hemenway, Vermont Historical Gazetteer, volume II (1871); Vermont Watchman and State Journal (Montpelier), May 2, 1842.]

P. D. E.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 628:

PAINE, Elijah, jurist, born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, 21 January, 1757; died in Williamstown, Vermont, 28 April, 1842. He was graduated at Harvard in 1781, studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1784, began to practise in Vermont, and became largely interested in the development of that state. He engaged in agricultural enterprises and in the manufacture of American cloths, for which purpose he constructed an establishment at a cost of $40,000 in Northfield, Vermont, then a wilderness. He also built a turn pike about twenty miles in length over the eastern spurs of the Green mountains. Mr. Paine was a member and secretary of the convention to revise the state constitution in 1786, and in 1789 was commissioner to adjust the claims of New York and Vermont. He was a member of the legislature from 1787 till 1791, at the end of which term he was appointed judge of the supreme court, holding this office until 1795. He was then elected U. S. senator, as a Federalist, serving from 7 December, 1795, till 3 March, 1801, and from that year until his death he was U. S. judge for the district of Vermont. He was a member of the American academy of arts and sciences, of the American antiquarian society, and of other learned bodies, and was president of the Vermont colonization society. He was an earnest promoter of education, being a trustee of Dartmouth and Middlebury colleges, and of the University of Vermont. In 1782 he pronounced the first oration before the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard. Dartmouth gave him the honorary degree of A. B. in 1786, and Harvard that of LL. D. in 1812, which degree he also received from the University of Vermont in 1825. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


PAINE, Ephraim, supported abolition.

(Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 147-148)


PAINE, Halbert Eleazer (February 4, 1826-April 14, 1905), lawyer, Union soldier, congressman, and commissioner of patents. As a union Colonel commanding a regiment he refused to return negro fugitives who came to his lines. In the Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first congresses, to which Paine was elected as a representative from Wisconsin, he supported the Radical faction.

(Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 148-149:

PAINE, HALBERT ELEAZER (February 4, 1826-April 14, 1905), lawyer, Union soldier, congressman, and commissioner of patents, was the son of Eleazer and Caroline (Hoyt) Paine. He was descended from a long line of Puritan ancestry running back to Stephen Paine who migrated to New England in 1638. He was born at Chardon, Geauga County, Ohio, was educated in the schools of that community, and completed his academic training at Western Reserve College, from which he graduated in 1845. After graduation he removed to Mississippi, where he taught school for a time, but soon returned to Ohio and took up the study of law. In 1848 he was admitted to the bar and began practice at Cleveland. On September 10, 1850, he was married to Elizabeth Leaworthy Brigham of Windham, Ohio. Removing to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1857, he opened a law office there, and soon formed a partnership with Carl Schurz [q.v.]. The latter was so constantly engaged in politics, however, that the work of the office fell almost completely upon Paine. Both were idealists and in considerable measure crusaders. When the Civil War broke out, Paine " turned the key in his office and joined the army." He was commissioned colonel of the 4th "Wisconsin Cavalry, July 2, 1861, and brigadier-general of volunteers, March 13, 1863. At Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, his regiment was offered a stock train for transportation, which he indignantly refused, and, arming his men with pick handles, he seized the next suitable train that passed through. He refused to return fugitives and also declined to obey General Butler's order to burn Baton Rouge. His military service was distinguished. He lost a leg in the attack upon Port Hudson, Louisiana, and thereafter served on a military commission, as commander of forts in the defense of Washington, and finally as commander of the military district of Illinois. He was brevetted major-general of volunteers, March 13, 1865, for conspicuous gallantry on several occasions, especially at Port Hudson. On May 15, 1865, he resigned from the army.

In the Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first congresses, to which Paine was elected as a representative from Wisconsin, he supported the Radical faction. His two speeches on reconstruction subscribe to the "State Suicide Theory" (Congressional Globe, 40 Congress, 2 Session, App., pp. 272-75, 314-16). In the Fortieth Congress, he was chairman of the committee on militia and in the Forty-first, he served as chairman of the committee on elections, of which he had been a member during his first term in Congress. The position was extremely important, because of the question of seating representatives from the Southern states. As a practical politician, from his position as chairman of the committee on contested elections, he was sometimes forced to answer Thaddeus Stevens' question, " Which is our rascal?" His reports to the House were brief, direct, and conclusive.

Declining to stand for reelection in 1870, he took up the practice of law in Washington. His former law partner, Carl Schurz, pressed him to become the assistant secretary in the Department of the Interior. He declined for financial reasons, but la ter accepted the post of commissioner of patents. During his eighteen months in this office (November 1878-May 1880), he instituted important changes in the bureau. The most important of these were the substitution of scale drawings for models; the provision that errors of the patent office could be rectified without changing the date of the origin of the patentees rights; the dating of claims for grants from the time of receipt of the application instead of at some time within three months thereafter; and the introduction of the use of typewriters.

After his resignation Paine resumed law practice, which he followed to the end of his life. In 1888 he published A Treatise on the Law of Elections to Public Offices, which remains the authoritative work upon the subject. It exhibits the rules and principles applicable to contests before judicial tribunals and parliamentary bodies, and is based upon American, English, Scotch, Iris h, and Canadian authorities. It consists of 900 pages of heavily annotated text and a comprehensive list of cases (to 1888) which constitute the precedents from which the rules and principles are derived. Systematically presenting all the aspects of the law upon elections, it stands as a monument to the industry, comprehension, and thoroughness which were dominant attributes of the author's character.

[Milwaukee Journal, and Milwaukee Sentinel, April 17, 1905; S. B. L add, "Halbert Eleazer Paine," in Jour. of the Patent Office Society, November 1920; The Who's Who in America, 1903-05; Paine Family Records, January 1882, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, volumes II (1907), III (1908); F. B. Heitman. Historical Register and Directory U. S. Army (1903), volume I; War of the Rebellion, Official Records (Army); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928).]

J. L. s.


PAINE, H. M., New York, abolitionist, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


PAINE, John A., New York, abolitionist, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


PAINE, Thomas, 1737-1809, founding father.  He was a pioneer in the movement for the abolition of negro slavery (Pennsylvania Journal, March 8, 1775).  Wrote Slavery in America, 1775.  “But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without farther design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is a height of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practiced by pretended Christians…  As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments, whenever they come, should in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery…  Certainly one may, with as much reason and decency, plead for murder, robbery, lewdness, and barbarity as for this practice.”

(Sinha, 2016, pp. 29, 36, 102, 257, 339, 352, 522; Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume IV, pp. 631-632; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 16, p. 925; Appletons’, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 631-632; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 159; Hinks, Peter P., & John R. McKivigan, Eds., Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition.  Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 2007, Volume 2, pp. 519-520; Davis, 1975; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 19; Nash, Gary B., & Soderlund, Jean R. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; Soderlund, Jean R. Quakers & Slavery: A Divided Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 159-166:

PAINE, THOMAS (January 29, 1737-June 8, 1809), revolutionary political pamphleteer, agitator, deist author of The Age of Reason, was born in Thetford, England, the son of Joseph and Frances (Cocke) Paine. Joseph Paine was a poor Quaker corset maker, rather unhappily married to a lady who, as an Anglican and an attorney's daughter, must have been somewhat his social superior. Young Thomas went to grammar-school until he reached thirteen, when poverty made it necessary to apprentice him at the paternal trade. At nineteen he left home, shipping on the King of Prussia for a brief career as a privateer at the outbreak of war in 1756. His formal education can hardly have gone beyond the rudiments; indeed, as his enemies were delighted to point out, he never learned to write faultlessly grammatical English. In after life he referred frequently and proudly to his Quaker antecedents, and no doubt his feeling for the sanctity of the inner citadel of human consciousness had Quaker origins. But Paine had no trace of Quaker humility, no capacity for mystic self-surrender, and, since he fought in two wars, no absolute doctrines of non-resistance. He never, indeed, formally joined the Society of Friends. Nor, in spite of the efforts of a pious aunt, did he become an Anglican. He relates that a sermon on the Redemption, heard at the age of eight, impressed him with the cruelty implicit in Christianity, and made him a precocious rebel (Van der Weyde, ed., Life and Works, VIII, 71). Probably the most permanent influence of these twenty years upon him lay in the monotony of his occupation, in the ugliness of his poverty, in the gap-evident to himself at least-between his abilities and his apparent destiny.

For nearly twenty years more those abilities were concealed from the world. From 1757 to 1774 he was successively, and in various towns, corset maker, exciseman, school-teacher, exciseman again, tobacconist, and grocer. These last occupations he was able to carry on while maintaining his place in the excise. He went through two brief, childless marriages. His first wife, Mary Lambert, died within a year of their marriage at Sandwich on September 27, 1759; the second, Elizabeth Olive, whom he married on March 26, 1771, while he was stationed at Lewes, was legally separated from him in 1774. The separation seems to have been due, not to any scandal, but to temperamental difficulties on both sides. The mere fact of separation, however, proved later a boon to Paine's enemies, and was generously embroidered to discredit him (George Chalmers, Life of Thomas Paine, 1791, pp. 33-35; James Cheetham, Life of Thomas Paine, 1809, p. 30). He was twice dismissed from the excise: first, in 1765, for having, as he himself admitted, stamped as examined goods he had not examined at all; and finally, after a reinstatement which shows that his first offense was regarded as venial, for overstaying a leave of absence. The real motive for this second dismissal was probably Paine's activity as agent for the excisemen in their attempt to get Parliament to raise their wages, a form of agitation then rather novel, and even revolutionary. He drew up a brief for his fellow excisemen, The Case of the Officers of Excise, privately printed in 1772 (published also in 1793). Cut off from his salary as exciseman, he was obliged to go into an ordinary and by no means discreditable bankruptcy. Like many and other defeated European, he decided to try the new world. In London as lobbyist for his fellow excisemen, Paine had had the luck to meet Franklin, and to make a favorable impression upon him. In October 1774, bearing invaluable letters of introduction from Franklin, this "ingenious, worthy young man" left for Philadelphia (A. H. Smyth, Writings of Benjam.in Franklin, VI, 1906, pp. 248-49). Those years of failure and poverty had given Paine an education. He had not precisely learned from failure; he had, indeed, failed in business partly through too great a devotion to abstract learning. Ever since he had left school he had spent his spare time and money on books, lectures, scientific apparatus. He read widely but always seriously, worked hard at mathematics, experimented with mechanical contrivances. He thus achieved what was rare in Europe at the time, an education strictly confined to contemporaneous matters. No conservative, no evaluating discipline stood between his temperament and his times. Eighteenth-century science taught him to revolt against a society quite unscientifically constructed.

In Philadelphia, where he arrived on November 30, 1774, Paine fell naturally into journalism. He supported himself largely by contributions to Robert Aitken's Pennsylvania Magazine. His first year's work covered a wide range, from recent inventions to "Cupid & Hymen." He was a pioneer in the movement for the abolition of negro slavery (Pennsylvania Journal, March 8, 1775), but he cannot be numbered among the first defenders of women's rights. An article on that subject in the Pennsylvania Magazine, included by Conway in his edition of Paine's works, has been shown to be a translation from the French, a language Paine could not read (Frank Smith, in American Literature, November 1930, p. 277). Nor is it likely that Paine had any personal influence in establishing the text of the Declaration of Independence (Albert Matthews, Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, XLIII, 1910, pp. 241-53). Common Sense gives him sufficient title to originality and fame, and his acknowledged writings are extensive enough without uncertain additions based on "internal evidence."

Common Sense was published as an anonymous, two-shilling pamphlet of forty-seven pages in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776. It urged the immediate declaration of independence, not merely as a striking practical gesture that would help unite the colonies and secure French and Spanish aid, but as the fulfillment of America's moral obligation to the world. The colonies must fall away eventually, Paine said; a continent could not remain tied to an island. If now, while their society was still uncorrupt, natural, and democratic, these colonies should free themselves from a vicious monarchy, they could alter human destiny by their example. Paine was the first publicist to discover America's mission. It is curious that, though his political ideology was thoroughly Jeffersonian, he insisted in all his writings of this period on the necessity for a strong federal union, emphasizing the dangers of particularism and state sovereignty. These centralizing doctrines, emphatic in Common Sense, were expanded in Public Good (1780), a pamphlet directed against Virginia's western land claims. Paine undoubtedly consulted such leaders as Franklin and Rush about Common Sense, but the pamphlet itself was entirely his own, and was launched on his own responsibility. Its success was amazing. Paine himself wrote that 120,000 copies had been sold in le ss than three months, and his best biographer asserts that 500,000 were sold in all (Conway, Life, I, 67-69). Even allowing for exaggeration, these are impressive figures.

Paine's authorship soon became known. After defending himself as "Forester" in the Pennsylvania Journal from the attacks of the Loyalist William Smith, he enlisted in the army in time to join in the retreat across New Jersey. At Newark he set to work on his first Crisis, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19, and in pamphlet form on December 23. The famous words with which it begins, "These are the times that try men's souls," probably did not win the battle of Trenton, but its eloquence did hearten many. Cheetham, Paine's bitter enemy, writes that "the number was read in the camp, to every corporal's guard, and in the army and out of it had more than the intended effect" (Cheetham, Life, p. 56). Eleven other numbers of the Crisis, with four supernumerary ones, appeared in the course of the war. The whole work shows Paine at his best as a political journalist. Characteristic are number three (April 1777) suggesting vigorous measures against American Tories, and The Crisis Extraordinary (October 1780) pointing out how an efficient federal and state tax system could readily shoulder the burden of the war.

Paine's services obviously merited some reward. Occasional journalism was not, in his devoted but careless hands, an adequate means of self-support. In April 1777, he was appointed by Congress secretary to its committee on foreign ~flairs, a position he filled well enough until he was drawn into the extraordinary affair of Beaumarchais. Before France dared risk active alliance with the revolting colonies, supplies had been sent to America through the medium of Beaumarchais. Payment for these supplies was disputed. Silas Deane [q.v.], American agent recalled from France, upheld Beaumarchais' claim. Congress, however, relying largely on Arthur Lee [q.v.], who was still in France, refused payment. Deane, denied what he considered justice, rashly took to the newspapers in his own defense. Paine had the true revolutionist's scent for corruption, and an optimist's trust in the disinterestedness of the French government. He replied to Deane in the Philadelphia Packet, notably on December 15, 1778, January 2, and 9, 1779. In these letters he committed a double indiscretion: he supported his contentions by references to documents (reports from Lee), to which his position gave him confidential access; and by his statements he made it appear that the French government had sent supplies to the revolting colonies while it was still at peace with Great Britain. Under pressure from the French minister, Gerard, Paine resigned his position (January 8, 1779). Gerard asserts that he immediately thereafter got Paine to accept a thousand dollars a year to write anonymously in the papers in support of France, but that he proved an unreliable press agent, and had to be released. The statement has only Gerard's authority, and is inconsistent with Paine's character. He had, indeed, as his conduct in the Beaumarchais affair shows, an idealistic devotion to the revolutionary cause quite proof against the limitations of propriety and tact; but he was incapable of financial dishonesty (Conway, Life, I, chap. IX).

Paine was soon (November 1779) given an appointment as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly. He continued his Crisis, and in 1780 showed further his devotion to the revolutionary cause by heading with a subscription of $500 out of a salary installment of $1,699 (paper) a fund for the relief of Washington's army. In 1781 he accompanied John Laurens to France in search of further financial relief, and returned successfully in the same year with money and stores. Beyond his expenses, he got nothing for the trip, and further, he was obliged to give up his position in the Assembly. The successful peace found him honored but poor. New York, however, gave him a confiscated Loyalist farm at New Rochelle, and Pennsylvania £500 in cash. For Paine's modest needs this was enough, and until 1787 he lived in Bordentown, New Jersey, and in New York, mildly lionized, writing, and working on his most cherished invention, an iron bridge (D. C. Seitz, "Thomas Paine, Bridge Builder," Virginia Quarterly Review, October 1927, p. 571). In 1786 he published Dissertations 0n Government, The Affairs of the Bank, and Paper-Money, in which he asserted that paper money involved inevitable inflation and injustice to creditors, and insisted that the state of Pennsylvania could not legally repeal its charter of the Bank of North America.

Because of his bridge (which he despaired of getting erected in America), and no doubt his temperamental restlessness, he went to Europe in 1787. The fall of the Bastille found him in Yorkshire making desperate efforts to get his bridge built. He had passed two pleasant years, partly in France and partly in England, welcomed by liberals like Condorcet, Fox, and even Burke, as the author of Common Sense and the friend of Washington. The bridge did get built, and stood up, though Paine lost money in the affair. He went to Paris late in 1789, and for nearly three years alternated between Paris and London, a self-appointed missionary of the world revolution. England, Paine felt, needed his efforts if the revolutionary movement were to continue its spread, and Burke's downright and immediately popular condemnation of the French Revolution late in 1790 provided an excellent opportunity for him to exert them. Paine replied to Burke early in 1791 with the first part of his Rights of Man. A second part followed in February 1792.

The Rights of Man was first of all a party pamphlet, an excellent piece of special pleading in defense of specific measures taken in revolutionary France. It is also an exposition of the "principles of 1776 and 1789." Government exists, Paine said, to guarantee to the individual that portion of his natural rights of which unaided he could not ensure himself. These rights, with respect to which all men are equal, are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Only a republican form of government can be trusted to maintain these rights; and the republic must have a written constitution, including a bill of rights, manhood suffrage, executive officers chosen for short terms and subjected to rotation in office, a judiciary not beyond ultimate control by the people, a legislative body popularly elected at regular intervals, and a citizenry undivided by artificial distinctions of birth and rank, by religious intolerance, by shocking economic inequalities. Such a republic will be well and cheaply governed, or rather, little governed, for "government is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent" (Van der Weyde, VI, 241). Part II contains, rather inconsistently, numerous proposals for social legislation which show that Paine was not unaware of the class struggle. Finally, the Rights of Man was an appeal to the English people to overthrow their monarchy and set up a republic. Paine clearly hoped that his pamphlet would do in England what Common Sense had done in America. It did indeed become immensely popular 'with English radicals, and is said to have sold 200,000 copies by 1793 (Conway, Life, I, 346). It was suppressed by Pitt's government, and its author'; safe for the moment in France, was tried for treason and outlawed in December 1792.

Paine, with Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and certain Europeans of adequate virtue, had been made a French citizen by the Assembly on August 26, 1792. In September the new Frenchman was elected to the Convention from four departments, choosing to sit for the Pas de Calais. As he could not speak French, and had to have his speeches read for him, his role in that assembly was inconsiderable. His friends, notably Condorcet, who knew English well, were mostly among the respectable, prosperous, moderate republicans of the Gironde group, and Paine attached himself to their party. He did, however, assert his independence and his humanity at the trial of Louis XVI by urging that the king be imprisoned to the end of the war and then banished for life. After the fall of the Girondins in June 1793 Paine ceased, on his own admission, to attend an assembly which was but a subordinate part of the tyrannical government of the Terror (Van der Weyde, V, 308). With a few congenial friends, he lived peacefully in the semi-rural Faubourg St. Denis until, a vote of the Convention having deprived him of his French citizenship and parliamentary immunity, he was imprisoned on December 28, 1793, under a law providing for the imprisonment of nationals of countries at war with France. Poor Paine, outlawed in England, was now arrested in France as an Englishman. His imprisonment in the Luxembourg was not very harsh, for he was able to compose part of The Age of Reason there. He was never brought to trial and, after the fall of Robespierre had ended the Terror, was released in November 1794 at the request of the new American minister, Monroe, who claimed him as an American citizen.

There has grown up an exaggerated account of Paine's tribulations in France. His imprisonment has been seen as a plot devised by his bitter enemy, the American minister, Gouverneur Morris [q.v.], and consented to by violent Jacobin politicians anxious to rid themselves of a dangerous opponent. It is much more likely that the simple, official explanation is the true one. Paine was generally regarded by French politicians as a harmless humanitarian. Even his heresy on the execution of Louis XVI was forgiven on the ground that, as a Quaker, he could not vote for the death penalty. The debates in the Convention make it clear that he lost his French citizenship chiefly because patriotism, fanned by military defeat into hysteria, demanded extreme measures against foreigners. The very fact that he was never brought to trial is conclusive proof that the Jacobins did not desire his death. Morris had a conservative's dislike for Paine's ideas and activities, a social conformist's dislike for his Bohemian habits. When Paine formally applied to him for protection, Morris sent the French foreign minister a letter which mildly disclaimed responsibility for Paine's acts since his acceptance of French citizenship, but which did at least request that in,. formation be communicated to the American government. The minister's reply denied Paine's claim to American citizenship. Morris did not press the matter, and wrote Jefferson that Paine, even were the French brought to admit him an American citizen, would still be liable under French criminal law for offenses alleged to have been committed in France, and that he was better off unnoticed in jail than publicly on trial before the pitiless revolutionary courts. It seems gratuitous to attribute hypocrisy to Morris in an act displaying such obvious common sense and tact.

On his release from the Luxembourg, Paine, weakened by illness and without means of support, was hospitably cared for by Monroe and nursed back to health. Restored to his seat in the Convention, he appeared before that body in July 1795 and reiterated his faith in the Rights of Man. He next took up residence with Nicolas de Bonneville, a moderate republican journalist whom he had known before the Terror. Until 1802, when the Peace of Amiens made it safe for him to return to America, he lived in Paris, his slender resources eked out by the kindness of friends. He wrote variously, and helped to organize a little group of "Theophilanthropists," a sort of ethical culture society which aimed to supplant Christian superstitions with an orderly faith in humanity. He published a Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795), and an essay, Agrarian Justice, ... (1797). The Letter to George Washington (1796), in which he accused the president of bad faith or at least indifference, and Morris of deliberate plotting against him, was the outburst of a disappointed man not wholly free from delusions of persecution, and did much to injure his reputation in America.

The great work of this period was The Age of Reason (Part I, 1794; Part II, 1796). This so-called "atheist's bible" begins with the assertion, "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life." Paine, of course, was not an atheist, but a deist, and The Age of Reason was begun as a final justification for the metaphysical ultimates of his belief. He starts out with the familiar proofs of the existence of God, the argument from design and the argument from a first cause. He defines knowledge in the customary way of his century as clear, mathematical, and scientific. He then proceeds to show that man's knowledge of the Christian God is not that sort of knowledge. The second part of the work is an analysis of both testaments, book by book, designed to show that the Bible is inconsistent, and therefore not infallible. Almost everything that Paine brings forward here is today a commonplace of critical scholarship. His attempts at a treatment of comparative religions, such as his reference to "Christian mythology" and his scandalous analogy between the paternity of the first person of the Trinity and the paternities of Zeus, are modern enough in spirit, and today would offend many professing Christians by their manner rather than their matter-a remark which indeed holds true of the whole book. Having demolished Christianity, Paine returns to his God, whose power is apparent "in the immensity of the creation," whose wisdom is seen "in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed" (Ibid., VIII, 43).

In October 1802 Paine at last returned home to America. Mere physical absence, however, had not prevented his playing his usual contentious part in American politics. The first copy of the Rights of Man to arrive in America was lent by its recipient, J. Beckley, to Jefferson, with the request that he pass it on to the printer to get out an American edition. Jefferson [q.v.] passed it on, and wishing, as he characteristically explained later, to take off a little of the "dryness" of a formal accompanying note, added some genial remarks about the pamphlet's uses as an antidote to the "political heresies" of the time. The printer proceeded to publish Jefferson's note as a sort of official preface (P. L. Ford, Writings of Tho11ias Jefferson, V, 1895; pp. 328 ff.). The Federalists at once took up the phrase "political heresies" as leveled at John Adams-as indeed it was. J. Q. Adams as "Publicola" attacked Paine's principles and Jefferson's indiscretion in the Columbian Centinel (June-July 1791), and Paine found himself vicariously in the midst of the bitterest possible party warfare. The Age of Reason and the Letter to Washington served to maintain his highly controversial position in America. In 1801, Jefferson involved himself further by offering Paine passage home in a public vessel, the Maryland. By this time, as Henry Adams temperately puts it, Paine was "regarded by respectable society, both Federalist and Republican, as a person to be avoided, a character to be feared" (History of the United States, volume I, 1889, p. 317). Paine wisely refused the offer, and returned on a private vessel.

The last seven years of Paine's life were spent partly in Bordentown, partly in New York City and in New Rochelle. They were marked by poverty, declining health, and social ostracism. Paine wrote little of importance in these years. In New York he mixed with ' radical society, and especially with the rationalists gathered around Elihu Palmer as the "Columbian Illuminati." Madame de Bonneville, wife of his old Parisian friend, had come to America with her three children, one of whom was Benjamin de Bonneville [q.v.], of later fame. Paine generously helped to support the family, stranded in America when Napoleon refused to allow the father to leave France. In these final years of Paine's life center many of the tales told to his discredit-that he was a drunkard, a coward, an adulterer, a tavern atheist. Many of these have no basis at all. But one thing is certain; whether deservedly or not, his last years were those of an outcast. He died in New York on June 8, 1809. There is no evidence of a death-bed repentance, though naturally enough such stories were industriously circulated (Conway, Life, II, 420). Since consecrated ground was closed to the infidel, he was buried in a corner of his farm in New Rochelle. In 1819 William Cobbett [q.v.], to atone for his bitter attacks. on Paine in the nineties, had the latter's bones dug up, and took them back to England, intending to raise a great monument to the patriotic author of the Rights of Man. The monument was never erected, and on Cobbett's death in 1835 the bones passed into the hands of a receiver in probate. The court refused to regard them as an asset, and, with the coffin, they were acquired by a furniture dealer in 1844, at which point they are lost to history.

Any attempt at a calm appraisal of Paine's character runs the risk of shading hostile black and friendly white into a neutral gray. Men always described him in superlatives, and in anything less than superlatives he seems unreal. He took an extreme, partisan stand on two issues that still divide Americans: in politics, that of the Jeffersonians against the Hamiltonians; in religion, that of the modernists against the fundamentalists. That Paine was a revolutionary by temperament is a statement on which his admirers and his detractors can agree; but it does but form the start for an analysis of his character. The repressed circumstances of his youth taught him that something was wrong with the world. His familiarity with the scientific and sociological writings of his contemporaries gave him a definite idea of a much better world. Experience helped him to fill in the outlines of this picture of a better world, but hardly to alter them. To the end, Paine would put up with nothing less than the Republic of Man. In America, in England, in France, he was serving, not men, but Reason.

This devotion to an abstraction, combined with a temperament naturally rebellious, made Paine extraordinarily sure of himself. His success as a writer sustained his self-confidence, while his failure at everything else supplied him with an abundance of grievances. This quality appeared to his enemies as a colossal vanity. Etienne Dumont wrote that he "was drunk with vanity .... It was he who had done everything in America. . . . He fancied that his book upon the Rights of Man ought to be substituted for every other book in the world" (Recollections of Mirabeau, 1832, p. 271). Even in the pages of his friend Monroe, this vanity comes out, perhaps in a truer light, as an extraordinary conviction of his own rightness, of his superior obligation to follow the light of his own reason (S. M. Hamilton, Writings of James Monroe, II, 1899, p. 441). He had also the unworldliness of the true revolutionary. Much has been made of his failure to enrich himself out of the hundreds of thousands of pamphlets he scattered over the western world, of his selling Common Sense at a loss, of his gift of the profits from the Rights of Man to the radical London Corresponding Society. But he did these things perhaps as much from indifference as from generosity. He simply lacked, as his early failures in business show, the gift of managing his own affairs. One suspects that towards the end he came to nurse this weakness as a virtue. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that in some respects Paine was the professional radical, the persecuted witness against the sins of the mighty. No doubt he was badly treated by respectable people on his return to America. No doubt he really was persecuted for his failures, big and little, to conform to current standards. But he gained an easy if somewhat shabby martyrdom thereby. And, cruel though the remark may seem, a happy, honored Paine is inconceivable in any world short of his own ideal one.

Of many of the aspersions spread by the pious and the conservative against Paine's character, we can make short shrift. Like most hated public men, he was accused of sexual irregularities, but all the evidence makes him out a singularly chaste man. After his death, Cheetham accused him of adultery with Madame de Bonneville, thirty-one years his junior. She brought a libel action against Cheetham and won it triumphantly. (Conway, Life, II, 399). Nor can Paine be accused of financial dishonesty. He h ad numerous connections, especially in France, with men who were enriching themselves at public expense, but no one has succeeded in pinning a single job on him. Neither the charge that he beat his first wife nor that of his cowardice during the New Jersey campaign rests on any real evidence. That of drunkenness is a different matter. Too many people, friends and foes alike, have mentioned Paine's fondness for the brandy bottle for the fact of his drinking to be disputed. In his old age, he probably drank rather frequently. But he never was, as fanatics have charged, a dipsomaniac, nor did he die in delirium tremens. He seems always to have been careless about his personal appearance, and age and ostracism made him in his last years a trifle unlovely.

This opinionated and temperamental revolutionary never could bear to inflict physic al suffering on any creature. He could not, like Robespierre, be cruel to men under the comfortable illusion that he was destroying abstractions. He did at times incline to think the great mass of people fools. He is reported in a work of fiction, indeed, but with great psychological truth as having defended the proposition that the minority is, even in a legislative body, more apt to be right than the majority (Royall Tyler, The Algerine captive, 1802, volume I, chap. XXVIII). But this paradox has become almost a traditional property. of modern liberalism. It was one c~ the beliefs that helped di sa rm Paine for action, and prevent him from turning persecutor. In the last madness of the French Revolution he appears touchingly sane and modest. He cared too much for his ideal state-for liberty, equality, and fraternity-to risk trying to realize it. His ideals, his sense of martyrdom and election, his softness, all the qualities that made him a good agitator, combined to turn him against the Terror.

Paine seems never to have labored to learn to write, but to have written easily and well from the moment, near middle age, when he decided to make writing his occupation. Now he did not write romantic prose, nor Augustan prose. He has nothing to do with mystery nor with majesty. But his prose is not pedestrian. He wrote neatly, lucidly, argumentatively, with the simplicity that apes artlessness. His sentences are brief, or at least relatively free from inversions and other Latin tricks. All his rhetoric is centred on the epithet, not on the sentence structure. He is full of telling and quotable phrases: "government is for the living, and not for the dead"; "society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness"; "the ragged relic and the antiquated precedent, the monk and the monarch, will molder together" (Van der Weyde, VI, 26; II, 97; VI, 302). If, as in the last quotation, the epithets are a trifle theatrical, the effect on his audience is all the more telling. Jefferson thought Paine's style resembled Franklin's. Both men, indeed, wrote simply in a century fond of periodic eloquence. But Paine is moving, almost passionate, in a curiously contentious way; his aphorisms lack the sleek touch of common sense. Paine was always pleading a cause; his books are arguments, rather than expositions. Occasionally his pleading seems unnecessarily involved, or descends to endless chicanery. But in general he succeeds admirably in being interesting, understandable, and irritating-necessary virtues of a revolutionary journalist.

Paine belongs rather to the history of opinion than to the history of thought; he is the propagandist, through whom the ideas of great original thinkers are transmitted to the crowd. Yet one cannot in fairness deny him that measure of originality which makes stereotypes of philosophical abstractions. His written work, and in particular his major writings, Common Sense, the Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason can be taken as one of the typical patterns of eighteenth- century thought in Europe and America -in some respects, perhaps, as the most typical of such patterns. At first sight, his surprising ignorance of French may seem to have limited his command over the materials common to his contemporaries. But he mixed with the leading radicals of both continents, learned a great deal by talking, and thus absorbed his Bayle and his Voltaire, his Rousseau and his Holbach at second hand.

Fundamental to this pattern of Paine's is the notion that mechanical causation in the Newtonian sense is an absolutely universal phenomenon. The laws of Nature, in his opinion, apply to politics as to astronomy, and in both fields men can, by discovering these laws and adapting their conduct to them, make their live s orderly and agreeable. Now in politics the majority of men have, through ignorance, disobeyed these laws and have reaped the consequence in unhappiness. To set up kings and priests to secure political health is as foolish as to set up magical incantations to secure physical health. An enlightened people will abolish old institutions as old superstitions, and in their place put the law of Nature, codified in the Rights of Man. Force as we know it will cease to exist, and all government will be self-government. Paine does not, of course, put things quite as baldly as this. He fills in the pattern with many and sometimes contradictory details. In particular, he hesitated before a dilemma familiar to his contemporaries are common men to be trusted to manage their own affairs, or must the enlightened central government restrain selfish or ignorant particularism? Though the theoretical bases of his thought are all on the anarchic side, he often proposes practical measures on the authoritarian side (Van der Weyde, VII, 18; IV, 219 ff.). He makes no real attempt to sound the meaning of his favorite abstractions-rights, liberty, equality. His thought lacks subtlety and shading. Like most of his contemporaries, he is a confirmed environmentalist. But Paine is blunter than any one but a propagandist may be. "Man i s not the enemy of man," he asserts, "but through the medium of a false system of government" (Ibid., VI, 209). Heredity is a mere political imposition. It has no justification in nature. Wisdom, in particular, is a "seedless plant" (Ibid., 263).

These political ideas, save where they are preserved in such pieces of ritual as the preamble to the Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, seem now outmoded enough. Much in Paine's writings is almost quaint, as when he argues that his deist God created the solar system in order to teach men mathematics (Ibid., VIII, 83). The nineteenth century pointed out adequately enough the weakness of his political philosophy-the abuse of the deductive method. the assumption that men are capable of guiding their conduct wholly by reason, the contempt for history, the faith in written constitution s, th e neglect of economic conflicts. The twentieth century is bidding fair to undermine the mechanical concept of causation on which his whole system rests. But of the work of Paine and men like him this much at least remains: the final destruction of the idea of a society hierarchically organized under a pessimistic and static cosmology; and the belief, now apparently rising again in a chastened form after the anti-rationalism of the nineteenth century, that human reason is man's best guide in politics and in ethics.

As to how much influence Paine's writings exerted on the course of history, there can be no final answer. Conceivably the United States of America might have become a free nation had Common Sense never been written. But even those who see history determined by economic and other physical, concrete forces can hardly deny that Common Sense helped to humanize and to concentrate such forces. Since his death Paine has lived on as a hero to a relatively small band of free-thinkers, of which men like Ingersoll and Bradlaugh were leaders. He has played in both Anglo-Saxon countries a role similar to that played by Voltaire on the Continent. To the majority of Englishmen and Americans, his name has been anathema. Not even his services during the Revolution have made him popular in the land which, after the abstract Republic of Man, he held most dear. There are signs, however, that the "atheist" is being forgotten in the patriot. At the celebration of the centenary of his death in New Rochelle in 1909, a Son of the American Revolution, in full Continental uniform, shared the platform with Painite free-thinkers. But there are still many to whom Paine is, as he was to Theodore Roosevelt, a "filthy little atheist" (Gouverneur Morris, 1888, p. 289). The discredit into which Paine fell is no doubt explicable partly by the fact that he was temperamentally a rebel, a socially disreputable professional agitator, and that America has done its best to live down this aspect of its origins; partly by the fact that his life was an unheroic sequence of purely literary struggles.

[Paine's unpublished letters and papers were destroyed by fire while in the possession of General Bonneville. Most of his letters to Jefferson and other contemporaries have been used by Conway in his Life. Further scholarly research like that of Frank Smith, "New Light on Thomas Paine's First Year in America," American Literature, January 1930; "The Authorship of 'An Occasional Letter upon the Fair Sex,'" Ibid., November 1930, can no doubt add somewhat to our knowledge of Paine' s minor journalistic writings. The first critical and complete edition of his works is that of M. D. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine (4 volumes, 1894-96). The edition of W. M. Van der Weyde, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (10 volumes, 1925), adds nothing of importance to that of Conway. There are numerous separate and inexpensive editions of Common Sense, The Crisis, the Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason.

Early examples of hostile lives are those of George Chalmers, or "Francis Oldys" (1791); and James Cheetham (1809); of friendly lives, those of T. C. Rickman (1819), and Gilbert Vale (1841). The standard biography is M. D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 volumes, 1892); this was translated by Felix Rabbe, and published, with additional material, as Thomas Paine (I737-I809) et la Revolution dans le deux Mondes (1900). Conway is an uncritical admirer, and constantly exaggerates Paine's achievements; he is somewhat careless about giving exact references to his authorities. But he did a thorough piece of research in Europe and in America, and generously publishes his evidence as well as his conclusions. Subsequent lives by Ellery Sedgwick (1899), F. J. Gould (1925), W. M. Van der Weyde (1925, volume I of the same author's edition of the Works), and M. A. Best (1927), have added no important facts, and little critical interpretation.

For Paine's political and theological ideas, see Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the I8th Century (2 volumes, 1876), I, 458-64; II, 260-64; M. C. Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution (1897), I, 4 52- 74; C. E. Merriam, "Thomas Paine's Political Theories," Political Science Quarterly, September 1899, pp. 389-403; F. J. C. Hearnshaw, ed., Social and Political Ideas of ... the Revolutionary Era (1931), 100-40. A recent article is H. H. Clark, "Toward a Reinterpretation of Thomas Paine," American Literature, May 1933. An obituary is in New York Evening Post, June 10, 1809. Th ere are no critical bibliographies; see the "Brief List of Paine's Works" in Conway, Life, II, 482-83; "Selected Reading List" in A. W. Peach, Selections from the Works of Thomas Paine (1928), i-iii.]

C. B-n.

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume IV, pp. 631-632:

PAINE, Thomas, born in Thetford, Norfolk, England, 29 January, 1737; died in New York, 8 June, 1809. His father, a Quaker, was a stay-maker, and Paine was brought up to the trade. He left home before reaching his majority, and went to London, but soon moved to Sandwich, where he married the daughter of an exciseman and entered the excise service. On the death of his wife, who lived but a year, he returned to London, and, after teaching, re-entered the excise service, in which he remained for some years, employing some of his leisure time in writing prose and verse and preaching from dissenting pulpits. He was selected by his official associates to embody in a paper their complaints and desires regarding the management of the excise; and on this work he displayed such ability as a writer that Benjamin Franklin, then the Pennsylvania colony's agent at London, suggested that America would be a more satisfactory field for the exercise of his special abilities. Naturally a republican and radical, and so persistent a critic of England's government and political customs that he seemed almost to hate his native land, Paine came to this country in 1774, and, through letters from Franklin, at once found work for his pen. Within a year he became editor of the “Pennsylvania Magazine,” and in the same year contributed to Bradford's “Pennsylvania Journal” a strong anti-slavery essay. The literary work that gave him greatest prominence, and probably has had more influence than all his other writings combined, was “Common Sense,” a pamphlet published early in 1776, advocating absolute independence from the mother country. In this little book appeared all the arguments that had been made in favor of separation, each being stated with great clearness and force, yet with such simplicity as to bring them within the comprehension of all classes of readers. The effect of this pamphlet was so powerful, instantaneous, and general that the Pennsylvania legislature voted Paine £500, the university of the state conferred upon him the degree of M. A., and the Philosophical society admitted him to membership. “Common Sense” soon appeared in Europe in different languages, and is still frequently quoted by republicans in European nations. His “Crisis,” which appeared at irregular intervals during the war for independence, was also of great service to the patriot cause; the first number, published in the winter of 1776, was read, by Washington's order, to each regiment and detachment in the service, and did much to relieve the despondency that was general in the army at that time. It has frequently been asserted that Paine was the author of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but the evidence offered is far from conclusive. After serving a short time in the army as aide to General Nathanael Greene, he became secretary of the congressional committee on foreign affairs, and losing this place in 1779, through charges against Silas Deane, commissioner to France, he became clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature. While holding this place Paine made an urgent appeal to the people in behalf of the army, which was in extreme destitution and distress, and he proved his earnestness by subscribing his entire salary for the year to the fund that was raised. In 1781 he was associated with Colonel Laurens in the successful effort to obtain loans from France and Holland. The nation was profoundly grateful for Paine's services, and endeavored to reward him. Soon after peace was declared congress voted him $3,000, the state of New York gave him a large farm in Westchester county, and Pennsylvania again made him clerk of her legislature. 
The close of the war deprived him for a time of the intense mental stimulus that seemed necessary to his pen, and he turned his attention to mechanics, one of his inventions being an iron bridge, which he endeavored, in 1787, to introduce in Europe. Reaching France during the revolutionary period, he published, under an assumed name, a pamphlet advocating the abolition of royalty. In 1791 he published in England his “Rights of Man,” in reply to Burke's “Reflections on the French Revolution.” For this he was outlawed by the court of king's bench, in spite of an able defence by Lord Erskine. Escaping from England, he went to France, where he was received as a hero and elected a member of the National convention. His republicanism, however, was not extreme enough to please the Jacobins; he opposed the beheading of the king, urging that Louis should be banished to America. The Jacobins finally expelled him from the convention on the ground that he was a foreigner, although he had become a French citizen by naturalization, and Robespierre had him thrown into the Luxembourg prison, where he spent nearly a year in anticipation of the guillotine. Released finally through the efforts of James Monroe, American minister to France, he resumed his seat in the convention, and gave lasting offence to the people of the United States by writing an abusive letter to President Washington, whom he accused of not endeavoring to secure his release from prison. He also alienated most of his American friends and admirers who were religiously inclined by his “Age of Reason” (2 parts, London and Paris, 1794-'5), an attack upon the Bible, written partly while he was in the Luxembourg prison. Six years later, however, when he returned to the United States, he still stood so high in public esteem that President Jefferson allowed him, at his own request, to be brought home by an American sloop-of-war, and he was favorably received in society. He took no active part in politics after his return, and it is generally admitted that intemperance and other vices had weakened his mental abilities. In 1809 he died in New York, and by his own direction was buried on his farm at New Rochelle, where he had spent most of the seven last years of his life. A few years later William Cobbett, the English radical, removed Paine's bones to England, with the hope of increasing enthusiasm for the republican ideas of which Paine was still the favorite exemplar in print; but the movement did not produce the desired effect, and it is believed that the remains found their final resting-place in France. The monument for which Paine provided in his will still stands over his first grave, beside the road from New Rochelle to White Plains. 
In addition to the books that made him prominent as a republican, patriot, and unbeliever, Paine wrote many pamphlets, some published anonymously. Most of them were on political topics of the time; but he also wrote largely on economics and applied science. Among his later works were suggestions on the building of war-ships, iron bridges, the treatment of yellow fever, Great Britain's financial system, and the principles of government; he also formulated and published a plan by which governments should impose a special tax on all estates, at the owner's death, for the creation and maintenance of a fund from which all persons, on reaching twenty-one years, should receive a sum sufficient to establish them in business, and by which all in the decline of life should be saved from destitution. 
Few men not occupying his official or ecclesiastical position have been as widely known as Paine, or subjects of opinions so contradictory. Abhorrence of his anti-religious writings has made many critics endeavor to belittle his ability and attribute his “Common Sense,” “Crisis,” and “Rights of Man” to the inspiration of other minds. It is known that “Common Sense” was written at the suggestion of the noted Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia. But beyond doubt Washington, Franklin, and all other prominent men of the Revolutionary period gave Paine the sole credit for everything that came from his pen, and regarded his services to the patriot cause as of very high and enduring quality. His “Rights of Man,” if the undenied statement as to its circulation (a million and a half copies) is correct, was more largely read in England and France than any other political work ever published. His “Age of Reason,” although very weak as an attack upon the Scriptures, when compared with some of the later criticisms of the German school, and even of some followers of Bishop Colenso, was so dreaded in its day that more than twenty replies, by as many famous divines, quickly appeared; among these was Bishop Watson's famous “Apology for the Bible.” Many of Paine's later acquaintances believed that the author of the “Age of Reason” was not proud of his most berated book. Paine admitted, on his return to this country, that he regretted having published the work, for, while he did not disavow any of the contents, he had become convinced that it could do no good and might do much harm. It is known that Benjamin Franklin, himself a doubter, counselled Paine not to publish the “Age of Reason,” saying: “Burn this piece before it is seen by any other person, whereby you will save yourself a good deal of mortification from the enemies it may raise you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance.” The fault of the book was not merely that it questioned cherished religious beliefs, but that it attacked them with invective and scurrility of a low order. Paine's apologists plead in extenuation that much of the book was written in prison, under circumstances that destroyed the faith of thousands more religious than the author of the “Age of Reason” It must be noted that Paine never was an atheist; born a Quaker, and roaming through the various fields of dissent from the established faith, he always believed in the existence of a God, and had high and unselfish ideals of the Christian virtues. Men who died not many years ago remembered that in the last few years of his life Paine frequently preached on Sunday afternoons in a grove at New Rochelle, and that his sermons were generally earnest and unobjectionable homilies. By nature Paine was a special pleader, and neither education nor experience ever modified his natural bent. He was a thinker of some merit, but had not enough patience, continuity, or judicial quality to study any subject thoroughly. Whatever conscience he possessed was generally overborne by the impulse of a strong nature that never had practised self-control. He; lacked even the restraint of family influence; his first wife lived but a short time, from his second wife he soon separated, an irregular attachment to the wife of a Paris publisher did not improve his character, and he had no children nor any relative in this country. Although affectionate and generous, he was so self-willed and arrogant that none of his friendships could be lasting after they became close. Between improvidence and the irregularities of his life he frequently fell into distresses that embittered his spirit and separated him from men who admired his abilities and desired to befriend him. In spite of his faults, however, the sincerity of his devotion to the cause of liberty cannot be doubted, nor can the magnitude of his service to the United States be diminished. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 631-632.


PAINTER, Charles C., died 1895, abolitionist, Native American advocate, clergyman.


PALFREY, John Gorham, 1796-1881, author, theologian, educator, opponent of slavery.  Member of Congress from Massachusetts from 1847-1849 (Whig Party).  Early anti-slavery activist.  Palfrey was known as a “Conscience Whig” who adamantly opposed slavery.  He freed 16 slaves whom he inherited from his father, who was a Louisiana plantation owner.  While in Congress, Palfrey was a member of a small group of anti-slavery Congressmen, which included Joshua Giddings, of Ohio, Amos Tuck, of New Hampshire, Daniel Gott, of New York, David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, and Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.  In 1848, Palfrey failed to be reelected because of his anti-slavery views.  In 1851, he was an unsuccessful Free Soil candidate for the office of Governor in Massachusetts. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 634; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 169-170; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 16, p. 932; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); J. S. Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators (1853); Boston Transcript, April 27, 1881; Rayback, 1970, pp. 82, 95, 97, 245, 248;). 

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume IV, pp. 634:

PALFREY, John Gorham, author, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 2 May, 1796; died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 26 April, 1881, received his elementary education at a boarding-school kept by the father of John Howard Payne at Exeter, and was graduated at Harvard in 1815. He afterward studied theology, and was ordained pastor of the Brattle street Unitarian Church, Boston, 17 June, 1818, as successor to Edward Everett. His pastorate continued until 1830, when he resigned, and in 1831 he was appointed professor of sacred literature in Harvard, which chair he held till 1839. During the period of his professorship he was one of three preachers in the University chapel, and dean of the theological faculty. He was a member of the House of Representatives during 1842-'3, Secretary of State in 1844-'8, and was a member of Congress from Massachusetts, having been chosen as a Whig, from 6 December, 1847, till 3 March, 1849. In the election of 1848 he was a Free-Soil candidate, but was defeated. He was postmaster of Boston from 29 March, 1861, till May, 1867, and after his retirement went to Europe, where he represented the United States at the Anti-slavery Congress in Paris in the autumn of 1867. After his return he made his residence in Cambridge. He was an early anti-slavery advocate, and liberated and provided for numerous slaves in Louisiana that had been bequeathed to him. He was editor of the “North American Review” in 1835-'43, delivered a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1839 and 1842, contributed in 1846 a series of articles on “The Progress of the Slave Power” to the “Boston Whig,” and was in 1851 one of the editors of the “Commonwealth” newspaper. He was the author of two discourses on “The History of Brattle Street Church”; “Life of Colonel William Palfrey,” in Sparks's “American Biography”; “A Review of Lord Mahon's History of England,” in the “North American Review “; and also published, among other works, “Academical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities” (4 volumes, Boston, 1833'52), “Elements of Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan, and Rabbinical Grammar” (1835); “Discourse at Barnstable, 3 September, 1839, at the Celebration of the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Settlement of Cape Cod” (1840); “Abstract of the Returns of Insurance Companies of Massachusetts, 1 December, 1846” (1847); “The Relation between Judaism and Christianity” (1854); and “History of New England to 1875” (4 volumes, 1858-'64). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 634. [Grandson of William Palfry 1741-1780].

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 169-170:

PALFREY, JOHN GORHAM (May 2, 1796-April 26, 1881), Unitarian clergyman, editor, historian, was a grandson of Major William Palfrey who was paymaster of the American forces in the Revolution, and the son of John and Mary (Gorham) Palfrey of Boston, where John Gorham was born. He received his earliest education at a private school, and then went to Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, where he prepared for Harvard. He graduated from college with the degree of A.B. in 1815, having for a classmate Jared Sparks [q.v.]. After graduation he studied for the Unitarian ministry and in 1818 was ordained as minister of the Church in Brattie Square, Boston. He remained with that church until 1831, when he was appointed Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature in Harvard, a post which he filled until his resignation in 1839.

He had long before begun to write for the press, his earliest articles appearing in the North American Review, of which Sparks was editor. In 1825, during Sparks's temporary absence in Europe, Palfrey acted as his substitute. In 1835 he bought the Review and -conducted it with much success until he sold it to Francis Bowen [q.v.] in 1843. Between 1817 and 1859 he contributed thirty-one important articles to it. In 1842 and 1843 he was a member of the Massachusetts legislature. Meanwhile, he had become known as a lecturer, mainly on the evidences of Christianity, the Jewish Scriptures, and similar topics. He was interested in education, was chairman of the committee on education in the legislature, and cooperated with Horace Mann [q.v.] in his educational work. From 1844 to 1847 he was secretary of the Commonwealth and from 1847 to 1849 a member of Congress. In 1861 he was appointed postmaster at Boston, retaining that position until 1867. In politics he was at first a Whig and held his earlier offices as such; he was also an abolitionist, and himself freed a few slaves that he had inherited from his father, who had lived for a while in Louisiana.

Among his writings may be mentioned: Sermons on Duties Belonging to Some of the Conditions of Private Life (1834); Academical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities (4 Volumes, 1838-52); Lowell Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (2 volumes, 1843); "Life of William Palfrey," in Sparks's Library of American Biography (volume XVII, 1848); and the History of New England (4 volumes, 1858-75). A fifth volume of the History, which he had almost finished but had not had time to prepare for the press before his death, was published in 1890. Palfrey's claim to fame rests on this work. He appears to have been esteemed by his contemporaries, but his curious career-minister, professor, politician, postmaster, editor, writer, lecturer, and historian-indicates a certain lack of definite purpose and aim, a weakness of some sort in his character. A s a recognition of his historical work, he was twice elected to the Massachusetts Historical Society and twice resigned, and the Society took no notice of his death in the usual form of memoir. The History of New England was the result of a vast amount of research, and he was both painstaking and usually accurate in detail. Although there are minor errors, some of which only subsequent research has corrected, the innumerable foot-notes, which are a feature of the volumes, are still a convenient and useful mine of information as to events and characters in the period he treated. (It may be noted that owing to his advancing age, the last two volumes are considerably inferior to the first three.) By frequently alternating his chapters on colonial affairs with chapters on contemporary events in England, thus attempting to provide the reader with a more adequate background, he introduced what at that time was rather an innovation. For this he deserves much praise. He probably tried to be fair in his judgments and when the volumes appeared they were much acclaimed for their impartiality; but from the standpoint of today, the whole work must be considered as biased in several respects. In the relations between England and the colonies, Palfrey could see little but tyranny on the one side and Godfearing patriotism on the other. Now here does he show any real understanding of motives and problems. The work is strongly biased, also, by his inability to admit any flaws in the Puritans. So far as respects them, the volumes are special pleading throughout. Furthermore, the work is called a History of New England, although Palfrey writes as a retained advocate for Massachusetts when dealing with any conflict between that colony and the others, a notable example of this being his treatment of the Massachusetts-Rhode Island dispute over the Quakers. It may also be noted that he wrote as a clergyman and his sympathies were all with the ecclesiastical organization rather than with the laymen throughout the early struggles. Although his work has now been superseded for the general reader, it still retains much value for the special student, and for nearly half a century was the one standard work on New England.

He received the degree of LL.D. from St. Andrew's College, Scotland, as well as honorary degrees from Harvard, and was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. On March 11, 1823, he married Mary Ann, daughter of Samuel Hammond of Boston; they had six children, among whom were John Carver Palfrey [q. v.] and Sarah Hammond Palfrey. The latter, a woman of varied intellectual attainments, shared her father's interest in liberal theology and was prominent in the social and philanthropic movements of her day. Besides contributing to periodicals, she published poems and several novels.

[Proceedings American Antiquarian Society, n.s., volume I (1882); Report of the Proceedings of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia... 1881 (1882); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); J. S. Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators (1853); Boston Transcript, April 27, 1881.]

J. T.A.


PALMER, D. B., New York, abolitionist leader.

(Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971)


PALMER, John Mcauley (September 13, 1817-September 25, 1900), governor of Illinois, senator. He opposed Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill. When a resolution was offered to indorse the bill, he offered a substitute resolution condemning the bill and favoring the Missouri Compromise and the compromise measures of 1850. Although his resolution was rejected, he ran for state senator as an independent Democrat on a platform of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and was elected.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 187-188:

PALMER, JOHN MCAULEY (September 13, 1817-September 25, 1900), governor of Illinois, senator, was born in Scott County, Kentucky, the son of Louis D. and Ann Hansford (Tutt) Palmer, and the great-grandson of Thomas Palmer who emigrated to Virginia from England early in the eighteenth century. His father was a farmer and a Jacksonian Democrat with decided antislavery tendencies that led him to leave Kentucky for Illinois in 1831. He settled near Alton, and in 1834 the boy entered Shurtleff College at Upper Alton, Illinois, where he stayed for two years, financing himself by doing odd jobs around the college and town. Then he peddled clocks and taught in a country school before moving to Carlinville in 1839, where he began reading law in the office of John S. Greathouse. In December of that year he was admitted to the bar. His political career started in 1840, when he gave ardent support to Van Buren. On December 20, 1842, he was married to Malinda Ann, the daughter of James Neely of Carlinville, who died in 1885. They had ten children. In 1847 he was elected as a delegate to the Illinois constitutional convention and was later elected county judge under the new constitution. He was elected to the state Senate in 1851 and in 1854 opposed Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill. When a resolution was offered to indorse the bill, he offered a substitute resolution condemning the bill and favoring the Missouri Compromise and the compromise measures of 1850. Although his resolution was rejected, he ran for state senator as an independent Democrat on a platform of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and was elected.

He played an important part in the formation of the Republican party in Illinois, serving as president of the Bloomington convention in May 1856 and as delegate to the Republican National Convention at Philadelphia in June. In 1859 he was defeated as a Republican candidate for representative to Congress; in 1860 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention that nominated Lincoln; and in 1861 he was a delegate to the peace convention at Washington. He began his military career in May 1861 as colonel of the 14th Illinois Infantry. He served in Missouri and at the engagements of New Madrid, Point Pleasant, and Island No. 10, and he received the rank of brigadier-general in December 1861. In 1862 he was made commander of the 1st Division in the Army of the Mississippi, fought gallantly at Stone River and Chickamauga, and was rewarded by the rank of major-general. In August 1864 he a sked to be relieved of his command, owing to an altercation with General Sherman concerning his refusal to take orders from General Schofield, who, he claimed, was his junior in rank. The request was granted. Later he was given command of the Department of Kentucky but was relieved by request in 1866. The Summer of 1867 found him in Springfield practising law with Milton Hay. He reentered public life, however, in 1868, when he was elected governor of Illinois on the Republican ticket. In his inaugural address he alienated many Republicans and pleased most Democrats by taking a definite stand for state rights, deprecating the extension of power by the federal government. His administration was a difficult one. Monopolists, lobbyists, and various "rings" all sought special legislation. He did all he could to check hasty and unscrupulous legislation by the use of his veto power, but his efforts were largely unavailing. In all, some 1700 bills were passed. When the people of Chicago were left destitute by the disastrous fire of 1871, he quickly sent money and supplies. However, when Mayor Mason asked for federal troops to maintain order in the city, and Grant provided them, Palmer displayed his state-rights position by protesting that state troops could handle the situation and that the use of federal troops was unconstitutional. He was later sustained by the legislature.

In 1872, disgusted with the corruption of the Grant regime, he joined the Liberal Republicans in support of Greeley and soon thereafter rejoined the Democratic party. In 1884 he was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention that nominated Cleveland for president, and in 1888 he was defeated as Democratic candidate for governor. On April 4 of that year he was married to Hannah (Lamb) Kimball, the daughter of James Lamb and the widow of L. R. Kimball. Three years later he entered the United States Senate as a Democrat. As senator he served on the committees of military affairs, pensions, and railroads. He advocated a constitutional amendment to provide for the popular election of senators and urged the repeal of the Sherman Act of 1890. In 1896 he was the presidential candidate of the National or Gold Democrats on a platform denouncing protection and the free coinage of-silver. He polled only 130,000 votes. He returned to his profession in 1897 but spent most of his time in editing The Bench and Bar of Illinois (2 volumes, 1899) and in writing his memoirs, Personal Recollections of John M. Palm er: The Story of an Earnest Life (1901). He died in Springfield, Illinois.

[Autobiography, ante; The Biographical Encyclopedia of Illinois (1875); Joseph Wallace, Past and Present of the City of Springfield (1904), volume I; John Moses, Illinois, Historical and Statistical, volume II (1892); A. C. Cole, The Era of the Civil War (1919); E. L. Bogart, The Industrial State (1920); 1llinois. State Register (Springfield), September 26, 1900.]

E. B.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.