Of the founding generation, Jefferson is the only one who never abandoned Paine.
The friendship begins in 1781 in Philadelphia, when Jefferson was a delegate to the Continental Congress and Paine was the unofficial pamphleteer-in-residence to that Congress. They are mutual friends of Robert Morris and Henry Laurens; they are at the same table at the same dinners. By the time Jefferson sails for Paris in 1784 to take up the diplomatic post that George Washington had offered him, they are already in regular correspondence about, of all things, the Pennsylvania Bank and the design of iron bridges.
Paine sails for England in April 1787 to lobby for his iron-bridge invention, a single-arch wrought-iron span that would, he calculated, revolutionize bridge-building wherever there was iron and a river. He stops in Paris on the way, and stays a month at Jefferson’s house on the Champs-Elysees. He stays again on his way back to America in 1791. From those visits forward, the two men correspond as colleagues on a long-running project: how to design a republic that survives.
The Paris letters are extraordinary. Jefferson has a habit of confiding in Paine more candidly than he confides in his official American correspondents. Paine has a habit of summarizing French public opinion to Jefferson in the kind of compressed political prose that no American newspaper of the period offered. Reading the correspondence in 2026, you can see the line of force: Jefferson supplies the institutional politics, Paine supplies the popular politics, and together they form an analysis of the French Revolution that is sharper than either man alone could have produced.
What surprises a modern reader is how practical the friendship is. There are extended discussions of the iron-bridge proposal, including sketches in the margins of letters. There is a sustained correspondence about the design of the first US Mint and the standardization of weights and measures. There is a long debate about whether the United States should adopt the metric system (Jefferson eventually fights for it; Paine supports it; the argument is lost in 1795). The two men are, jointly, the kind of practical Enlightenment figure that the eighteenth century produced and the nineteenth century stopped producing.
The friendship is tested in 1796.
That year, Paine, recovering at the Folie de la Bouexiere from his Luxembourg imprisonment, writes the Letter to George Washington. The Letter is a thirty-thousand-word indictment of Washington for failing to secure his release from the French. It is published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Bache, Franklin’s grandson, and it lands in the middle of an American political moment Paine has misjudged badly. Washington is preparing to leave the presidency. The Federalist establishment treats the Letter as a near-treasonous attack. The Republican press, which should be sympathetic, is mostly embarrassed.
Jefferson, then Vice President under Adams, writes Paine a letter in March 1797 that does the work of remaining loyal without endorsing the polemic. He does not defend Washington (Jefferson and Washington had broken in 1793 over Hamilton); he also does not amplify Paine’s case. He writes, instead, about the iron bridge. The letter is a model of how to remain a friend across an act you cannot defend.
The friendship comes to its head in 1801. Jefferson is now President. Paine is still in France, where he has been since 1792. He is sixty-four; he wants to come home. He writes Jefferson asking for safe passage, since the British will board any commercial vessel he sails on and seize him as a seditious-libel convict. Jefferson, in October 1801, dispatches the USS Maryland (Captain Bishop) to Le Havre with orders to bring Paine home. The decision is private; Jefferson knows it will be politically expensive when it becomes public, and it is. The Federalist press abuses Jefferson for months for sending a national warship to retrieve “the most despicable of mankind.”
Paine arrives in Baltimore on October 30, 1802. The first letter he writes from American soil is to Jefferson at the President’s House. They meet in Washington in November. They meet again in March. The visits are observed by every Federalist newspaper in the country and by half the Republican ones; Jefferson’s standing in the House is damaged for a season. The President of the United States and the most-detested public figure in the country sit at the same dinner table.
What Jefferson said to Paine in those Washington dinners is not recorded. We have only the public record: that Jefferson refused, throughout his second term, to renounce Paine in any form. He never publicly distanced himself. He never accepted a Federalist invitation to repudiate. When Paine died in June 1809, the only government official who responded was Jefferson, who wrote a private letter to one of Paine’s executors that is now in the Library of Congress: I am sorry indeed for the loss of so virtuous and incorruptible a man. He has done much good service to the cause of his country and of mankind, and his name will be revered when his slanderers are forgotten.
The slanderers were not forgotten. They are read, in fact, more than Paine is. But Jefferson’s prediction held in one important sense: Paine has outlived the slanders, and the men who slandered him are read mostly by people who are looking up the citation. That is, in the end, what Jefferson’s loyalty bought.
The selected Paine-Jefferson correspondence is at /works/private-letters-to-jefferson/ and /works/private-letter-to-president-jefferson/.