The friendship begins on a December night in 1776 at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Delaware. Washington is preparing the army for the Christmas crossing to attack Trenton. Paine, who has been with the army since the retreat from New York in November, has just printed Crisis #1 in Philadelphia. Washington orders the pamphlet read aloud to every regiment before they move out. The opening sentence (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) goes from being a piece of journalism to being a piece of military oratory. The pamphlet, the army, the country, and the friendship are made on the same night.
For the next fifteen years they are friends. Not close friends; Washington is not capable of close friendships outside a small circle of Virginia planters. But they are friends in the operational sense: they correspond, they trust each other’s judgment, they ask each other for favors. Washington helps Paine get the Pennsylvania assembly clerkship. Paine helps Washington publicly defend the army during the worst of the war. After the war, when Paine builds his iron-bridge model and ships it to England in 1787, Washington provides the letter of introduction that opens the British engineering establishment to him. The letter is in the Library of Congress; it is gracious, specific, and warm.
The break comes during Paine’s French years.
In December 1793, Paine is arrested in Paris. The American minister to France is Gouverneur Morris, a New York Federalist who personally despises Paine and who is privately telling his correspondents in Philadelphia that Paine deserves whatever happens to him. Morris does nothing to invoke Paine’s American citizenship. Paine, in the Luxembourg, writes Washington directly in late 1794 asking for the President’s intervention. The letter goes through Morris, who routes it to slow channels.
Washington never replies.
There are several plausible explanations. The most charitable is that Washington was, by 1794, in the middle of his own political crisis (the Whiskey Rebellion, the Jay Treaty negotiations, the Federalist-Republican split that would define the rest of his presidency) and could not afford the political cost of being seen to intervene for a man whose Rights of Man had been judged seditious by the British government and whose conduct in the Convention had alienated the new American Federalist establishment. A less charitable explanation is that Washington had been hearing from Morris for two years that Paine was unstable and ungrateful, and Washington made the political calculation that doing nothing was the safe course. The least charitable explanation, which Paine himself eventually adopted, is that Washington had been corrupted by office and had abandoned the principles he had once shared.
Paine emerges from the Luxembourg in November 1794 having written, by his own count, more than thirty letters that did not reach Washington or that received no answer. He spends the next eighteen months in Monroe’s house, recovering, brooding, and writing. The result is the Letter to George Washington, published by Benjamin Bache in Philadelphia in November 1796.
The Letter is, by any measure, the most savage public document of Paine’s career. It is thirty thousand words long. It accuses Washington of personal ingratitude, of political duplicity, of being the willing instrument of the Federalist faction, of having abandoned Paine to die in a French prison while professing concern in private. It accuses Washington of having stage-managed his own military reputation, of having taken credit for victories his subordinates won, of having left the army at Valley Forge while his subordinates suffered. The Letter ends with one of the most bitter sentences Paine ever wrote about a once-friend:
And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
The Letter destroyed the friendship completely. Washington never replied; in his last public correspondence, written days before his death in December 1799, he refers to Paine as “that incendiary” without elaboration. The Letter also damaged Paine’s American standing for a generation. Federalists treated it as proof that Paine was unstable. Republicans, who privately agreed with much of the indictment, found the public expression embarrassing. Even Jefferson, who would defend Paine on every other front, refused to defend the Letter.
The historiographical question that hangs over the rupture is: was Paine right?
The answer, based on what we now know from the Morris papers, the Washington papers, and the State Department records that have been opened in the two centuries since, is mixed. Washington was not the cynical operator Paine accused him of being. The historical record does not support the most savage of the charges. But Washington also was not the passive victim of bad information that the Federalist defense made him out to be. Washington could have intervened for Paine in 1793-94 and chose not to, and the choice was, as Paine charged, partly political. The Letter overshoots; the indictment, in its more specific sections, holds.
What is most painful in the Letter, reading it now, is not the public charge against Washington. It is the private grief that runs underneath the public charge. Paine had spent his life arguing that republican government was distinct from monarchy precisely because republican leaders did not abandon their citizens. That was the line he had carried from Common Sense to Rights of Man. Washington’s silence was, for Paine, the proof that the project he had given his life to had not yet held. He was sixty when he wrote the Letter. He had spent twenty-three years on three continents arguing the case. The man who, of all the public figures in the world, owed him an answer, gave him none. The Letter is what a man writes when the answer he has been waiting for, for two years, does not come.
The full Letter is at /works/letter-to-george-washington/. Read it not as Federalist propaganda or Republican apologetics, but as a record of what happens when a friendship inside a young republic gets crushed by the pressure of the politics around it. The friendship was real. The break was also real.