Revolutionary Capitals

Thetford, Norfolk (1737-1756)

The market town in East Anglia where he was born January 29, 1737 in his father’s stays-maker’s shop on White Hart Street. A “rotten borough” -- two MPs returned by a few hundred eligible voters -- and an early lesson in political corruption. The Quaker meeting taught him plain prose; the grammar school taught him enough Latin to read it. He left at thirteen, ran away to sea at nineteen, and was retrieved from the dock by his father at the last possible moment.

Lewes, Sussex (1768-1774)

Posted to the excise at Lewes after years bouncing between Lincolnshire postings. He took lodgings above the tobacconist Samuel Ollive, joined the Headstrong Club at the White Hart Inn (where they awarded a nightly Plumed Hat to whoever argued the most stubborn case -- he took it home often), wrote his first published pamphlet (The Case of the Officers of Excise, 1772), married Elizabeth Ollive in 1771, lost his job and his marriage in 1774, and walked away from England with no prospects. The six years that taught him how to write.

Philadelphia (1774-1787, with absences)

Carried ashore on a stretcher on November 30, 1774 after a six-week passage on the London Packet during which typhoid killed five passengers. Edited the Pennsylvania Magazine through 1775, published African Slavery in America in March 1775, anonymously published Common Sense on January 10, 1776. Served as secretary to Congress’s Committee of Foreign Affairs through the Silas Deane affair. The American city he wrote in longest, and the city the Crisis papers were physically printed in.

Newark, New Jersey (December 1776)

One night, one drumhead, one pamphlet. Paine retreated with Washington’s army across New Jersey in December 1776; on the night of the 19th he sat down at a drumhead in Newark and wrote The American Crisis No. I. Four days later, Christmas Eve, the army was camped at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Delaware. Washington ordered the pamphlet read aloud to the troops. They crossed the river the next night and took Trenton on the morning of the 26th.

Bordentown, New Jersey (1783-1787)

The peace cottage. After the war Paine bought a small house at Bordentown on the Delaware -- his closest thing to a settled American home -- where he tinkered on the iron-arch bridge model, corresponded with Franklin and Jefferson, and waited out the constitutional decade he played almost no part in. He sailed for Europe from here in April 1787 with the bridge model in his luggage; the house was demolished in the 1870s.

London (1787-1792)

Joseph Johnson’s table in St Paul’s Churchyard was the working address of late-eighteenth-century English radicalism. Paine moved through the circle -- Wollstonecraft, Blake, Priestley, Godwin -- and turned out the bridge model and the bridge politics. Rights of Man Part I appeared in March 1791; Part II in February 1792. The cheap editions and pirate reprints were already in pubs and reading rooms by spring. Pitt’s government opened the mail, seized cheap editions, and indicted Paine for seditious libel. By September 1792 he had hours, not weeks, to leave.

Paris (1792-1802)

The decade of his life. He sailed from Dover for Calais on September 13, 1792 -- according to Gilchrist, William Blake himself tipped him off -- and the Convention seated him as deputy for the Pas-de-Calais a week later. Honorary citizenship; Convention seat; constitutional commission with Condorcet, Brissot, Petion, and Sieyes (1793); arrest by the Committee of Public Safety in December 1793; ten months in the Luxembourg prison, half of it under sentence of death; release through Monroe in November 1794; recovery in Monroe’s house; The Age of Reason Parts I and II; the Dissertation on First Principles of Government; Agrarian Justice; the Letter to George Washington; ten Bonneville lodgings; one near-execution. He left France in 1802 and never returned.

Baltimore → Washington → New York (1802-1803)

Jefferson sent the U.S. warship Maryland to Le Havre to bring him home; Paine landed at Baltimore on October 30, 1802 after fifteen years away. The Federalist press was waiting; the parsons preached against him from the pulpit before he had stepped off the gangplank. He travelled south to Washington, dined with Jefferson at the White House several times, wrote the eight Letters to the Citizens of the United States, then drifted north to New York City, where the few American friends he had left were keeping the deistical society alive around Elihu Palmer.

New Rochelle (1803-1809)

The 277-acre confiscated Loyalist farm New York had granted him in 1785. He moved to the cottage in 1803 -- sixty-six, increasingly frail, increasingly drunk in the afternoons, increasingly forgotten. The Quaker meeting voted against admitting him; the Anglican parish refused him communion in advance. On Election Day 1806 the New Rochelle election inspector refused to let him vote on the grounds that he was not a citizen of the United States. He sued. He lost. The decision was reversed posthumously.

Greenwich Village (1809)

The last room. Madame Bonneville moved him from New Rochelle to a Bleecker Street boarding house when he could no longer manage the farm; he died there on June 8, 1809, attended by her, two physicians, and the Quaker who had refused him a meeting burial. Six people attended his funeral on the New Rochelle land the next day -- Madame Bonneville, her two younger sons, two black freedmen who had walked from the city, and one Quaker farmer who broke ranks with his meeting. He was buried under an apple tree.

The bones (1819 -- present)

In October 1819 William Cobbett dug up the New Rochelle grave, packed the bones, and shipped them to England, intending a monument. Cobbett died in 1835. The monument was never built. The skull was reportedly seen for sale at a London auction in the 1840s; a bone identified as Paine’s right ulna passed through several hands in nineteenth-century freethought circles; a candidate skull surfaced in Sydney in 1989 and was tentatively matched in 1996. None of it has been confirmed. Where exactly Paine is buried -- if “buried” is even the right word -- is one of the genuine unsolved problems of nineteenth-century history.

Where to find the geography

Every dated event with a known location is plotted on the interactive timeline map. For the American writings see Conway Volumes I and II; for Rights of Man see Volume III; for the religious writings see Volume IV.