ON OCTOBER 30, 1802, after a two-month passage, Thomas Paine landed in Baltimore with his Paris bridge models. Several days after, he made the short journey to the nation’s new capital, Washington City. There, he deposited his bridges at the U.S. Patent Office, housed in the State Department. Paine then took up residence in one of the city’s rooming houses and began composing a petition for Congress, later published as his essay “The Construction of Iron Bridges.” The document explains that Paine was not seeking personal gain. He had no intention of taking an American patent on his invention; he simply wanted his adopted homeland to see the revolutionary promise of iron-arch construction. All that was needed, to this end, were funds for a single iron supporting rib of four hundred feet. “It is an advantage peculiar to the construction of iron bridges,” Paine explained, “that the success of an arch of a given extent and height can be ascertained without being at the expense of building the bridge.” Paine would oversee the design and construction of the structural rib and, upon demonstrating its capacity to sustain weight, would devote himself to the construction of the full Schuylkill bridge.1
The Congressional petition was more than a plea for money; it was also an act of self-defense. The author of Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason had not returned to his country to foment revolution or to argue the principles of Christianity. He had come as an agent of technological change. Other Americans might be building stone or wood bridges, or have the skill to craft the parts of an iron bridge, but few had the knowledge to assemble those parts into a structure that would make America’s rivers fully integral arteries of the new nation’s commercial life. In the United States, Paine alone was so equipped. With Congressional patronage to reassure investors, an iron bridge would soon be built across the Schuylkill.
In the end, the prospects for the petition were poor. Paine knew that his reputation had suffered terribly but he had no sense of the full depth of anti-Paine sentiment. Before Paine had even stepped ashore, Jefferson’s Federalist opponents attacked the President for supporting his return. What are the “religious or even decent, in this country, to think,” wondered the Baltimore Republican, when their president seems “determined to honor the drunken, impious wretch,” Tom Paine? With Paine’s arrival in Baltimore, the same paper urged the city’s lowly Jeffersonians to carry Paine about town in a cage. For, “no one would grudge fifty cents to see the demi-human arch beast” and “a very considerable sum might be collected—enough with which Paine might get drunk daily as long as he lives.” President Jefferson, it seemed, had refused to recognize the unpleasant reality that Paine was no longer the great American he had known many years earlier. “Paine’s character in Paris,” the Virginia Gazette observed, “is well known to have been so despicable . . . that his company was avoided, like the presence of a person infected with the plague. . . . Frequently he was found rolling and tossing in the streets, in a state of intoxication that astonished the Parisians unused to such spectacles of human depravation.”2
“We cannot suppose that this flaming comet,” the New York Evening Post noted, referring to Paine, “whose fiery course has so long astonished and terrified mankind will now stop its career, but rather that it will acquire accelerated rapidity in its orbit, and catch additional fire from its near approach to that sun of political, moral, and religious virtue, Mr. Jefferson.” Jefferson’s fame would bring new vitality to the former revolutionary, now better known for his face, “very red, and covered with a plentiful quantity of liquor blotches” and a nose “uncommonly large, red, and carbuncled.” The dangers Paine posed were on the minds of the editors of the New York Gazette, who reported that upon Paine’s arrival at a rooming house in Georgetown,
the landlord ushered him into the supper room with the formal introduction of ‘gentlemen, this is Mr. Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, The Crisis, Age of Reason, & C.’ when the company almost to a man rose from the table, and one of them in the name of the rest, called the landlord aside and informed him if Mr. Paine was permitted to stay in his house, they should consider it as their passport to quit it—When the Landlord, rather than loose a number of gentlemen, whispered in the ear of Mr. Jefferson’s affectionate friend that it would be somewhat inconvenient for him to accommodate him, and requested he would seek other quarters, which he was constrained to do.3
This likely apocryphal story nonetheless captured political reality and explains why Jefferson refused to take his friend’s bridges before Congress. After less than two months in Washington, a disgusted Paine shipped the models north to Philadelphia. The President had “not only shown no disposition towards” pursuing the bridge project, he “by a sort of shyness . . . precluded it.” His friend, Paine believed, had capitulated to partisan spirit, denying Americans an obvious public good.4
WITH NO HOPE for federal government support, Paine returned to Philadelphia. But his prospects there were equally poor. The painter Charles Willson Peale installed Paine’s models in his Philadelphia Museum, where they would remain, displayed alongside mastodon bones, stuffed birds, works of art, and other curiosities. The network of friends and fellow inventors who had long encouraged Paine was now gone.
Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse had died, and many of those who remained wanted nothing to do with Paine. His fellow revolutionary the evangelical Benjamin Rush refused to see him. “His principles,” Rush explained to a friend, “avowed in his ‘Age of Reason,’ were so offensive to me that I did not wish to renew my intercourse with him.” The reception was so hurtful that Paine spent only two days in the city. In the years that followed, the collapse of his reputation there would be a continued source of personal distress. In early 1806, after he discovered that the mayor of Philadelphia had publicly slandered another man by accusing him of being a disciple of the hated Paine, the city’s most celebrated revolutionary replied to the mayor with the dismissive, “I set too much value on my time to waste it on a man of so little consequence as yourself.”5
EVEN IF Paine’s reputation had survived the years of the French Revolution, the prospects of his new bridge would have been poor. While he built his models in Paris, American architects were devising their own much cheaper methods for addressing the country’s riverine barriers. Those new methods rested on a simple truth: what America wanted were inexpensive and easily constructed bridges. Stone and iron bridges were neither. In his own proposal for a Schuylkill bridge, Charles Willson Peale captured the sentiment succinctly. “I offer you,” he explained to readers of his 1797 pamphlet on wooden bridges, “a cheap and easy mode of building bridges, the principles of which are so simple, and the mechanism so easy, that any ingenious man may execute them.” Peale proposed a bridge whose supporting arches were composed of multiple layers of laminated wooden planks. Any reasonably skilled carpenter could build such a bridge.6
In 1811, Thomas Pope, an obscure craftsman and architect from New York City, published the first systematic American treatise on bridge building. The book surveyed the history of world bridges, although it made no mention of Paine. The reason, perhaps, was that Pope too saw no need to build with anything other than what the American countryside provided in so much abundance. Through lengthy calculations and tedious scientific argument, Pope established that wood was the ideal bridge-building material. Experimental science, he explained to his readers, demonstrated that “timber, as to its tension, and also compression, is not that weak and watery substance, so easily affected, as the blind theorists of our time would have them believe.” The enemies of wood rested their claims on vague theory, but its champions could show its superiority “without the assistance of any of the Sir Isaac Newtons of the present day.” The supreme expression of this truth would come from a novel design, Pope’s flying pendant lever bridge, a structure whose pedigree lay more with the gothic flying buttress than the classical arch. Much like Paine, Pope believed his bridge could span virtually any river, and he presented to his readers an 1800-foot example designed to cross the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The bridge was a single span that rose to 223 feet above the water. Instead of supporting itself, as any arch would, its lengthy arms would be anchored to the riverbanks by monumental embankment towers. For Pope, there was never any question that his stunning bridge would be made from wood.7
Nothing came of either Pope’s or Peale’s design, but they did reflect the near unanimous conclusion of American bridge builders. The United States would be a country of wooden bridges. In a neoclassical age stamped by the monumental buildings of antiquity, there was a certain ambivalence about this fact. To some, the sacrifice of permanence for ease of construction defeated the entire classical project. In place of great and lasting monuments, Americans made ephemeral buildings, vulnerable to fire, water, and the other forces of nature. As one early critic put it, “Bachelors only ought to build of wood—men who have but a life estate in this world, and who care little for those who come after them.” But these kinds of lamentations carried little weight. Americans grew so adept at wood construction that it was often difficult to distinguish from the more lasting forms of the Old World. Upon arriving in New York City during his famous American tour, Alexis de Tocqueville was surprised to notice “At some distance out from the city a number of little white marble palaces, some of them in classical architectural style. The next day, when I looked more closely at one of those that had struck me most, I found that it was built of whitewashed brick and that the columns were painted wood.” 8
There was no greater monument to America’s appetite for cheap wooden construction than the first Permanent Schuylkill River Bridge. Begun in 1801 and completed in 1805, the three-arched bridge spanned the river at Market Street. It had been designed and built for the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge Company by Timothy Palmer, a Massachusetts carpenter and self-taught bridge builder. Palmer had built a series of bridges across the Merrimack, Piscataqua, and Potomac Rivers. At the time of its completion in 1794, his bridge across the Piscataqua, near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was America’s greatest bridge. Its central arch, composed of three parallel timber ribs, was 244 feet in length. But Palmer’s most celebrated achievement by far would be the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge. The astonishing structure was nearly 500 feet long and consisted of three low-slung wooden arches on masonry piers. Palmer’s work had a distinguished pedigree. In the mid-eighteenth century, two Swiss brothers, Johannes and Hans Ulrich Grubenmann, had begun building wooden bridges in northern Switzerland, the most famous of which spanned the Rhine near the small town of Schaffhausen.
As Paine had long recognized, the same qualities that made wood-bridge construction so cost-effective also made it vulnerable. Rain, wind, snow, and ice, combined with the pulverizing effects of traffic, would all eventually induce wood rot. The Grubenmann brothers addressed these problems by enclosing their bridges with roofs and walls. Palmer’s bridge was not, initially, enclosed, a choice Palmer himself considered shortsighted. “It is sincerely my opinion the Schuylkill Bridge will last thirty and perhaps forty years, if well covered.” The alternative was for “this beautiful piece of architecture . . . which has been built at so great expense and danger, to fall into ruin in ten or twelve years.” Palmer’s views ultimately prevailed and, despite opposition from profit-minded shareholders, the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge Company hired Philadelphia architect and carpenter Owen Biddle to enclose the bridge. The resulting structure, Biddle observed, was initially “the only covered wooden bridge, in any country, except, perhaps,” Switzerland. But it would set a lasting American precedent.9
For foreign visitors, few structures were as striking as America’s covered bridges. Michel Chevalier, a French economist who toured the United States in 1834 observed that “the Americans are unequalled in the art of constructing wooden bridges; those of Switzerland, about which so much has been said, are clumsy and heavy compared to theirs.” James Silk Buckingham, an English journalist and Member of Parliament who visited the United States shortly after Chevalier, wrote that American bridges are “generally of wood, and are enclosed with sides and roofs, so that they form long arched tunnels over the streams, with windows on each side for light and air.” James Fenimore Cooper, writing as a fictional European bachelor touring the United States, noted that “a bridge, a quarter, a half, or even a whole mile, in length . . . is no extraordinary undertaking for the inhabitants of a country which, forty years before, and often less, was an entire wilderness.” For Cooper, “these avenues of timber” defied description. Often “the traveller, perhaps whilst ruminating on the recent origin of this country, finds himself journeying through an edifice which is from a quarter of a mile to a mile in length.” Through the course of that journey, according to another American writer, the traveler might read “the inscriptions in chalk and coal of those who had gone before.”
Charles Dickens, who visited the United States in 1842, described the extraordinary experience of approaching Harrisburg, which had become Pennsylvania’s capital in 1812. Dickens entered the town after passing through the nearly 3000-foot-long Camelback Bridge, named for the undulating appearance of its lengthy, covered structure:
We crossed [the Susquehanna] by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was profoundly dark; perplexed, with great beams, crossing and recrossing it at every possible angle; and through the broad chinks and crevices in the floor, the rapid river gleamed, far down below, like a legion of eyes. We had no lamps; and as the horses stumbled and floundered through this place, towards the distant speck of dying light, it seemed interminable. I really could not at first persuade myself as we rumbled heavily on, filling the bridge with hollow noises, and I held down my head to save it from the rafters above, but that I was in a painful dream; for I have often dreamed of toiling through such places, and as often argued, even at the time, “this cannot be reality.”10
AFTER PALMER, the German émigré Lewis Wernwag became the new nation’s most celebrated bridge architect. Catapulted to prominence by a building boom that followed the War of 1812, Wernwag designed and built twenty-nine mid-Atlantic bridges. His most famous, and among his first, was the Lancaster–Schuylkill Bridge, completed in the spring of 1813. Known as the “Colossus,” the 340-foot single-arch covered bridge crossed the river at Upper Ferry, replacing a dilapidated old floating bridge. The distinctive Greek Revival covering was designed by Robert Mills, an architect who had studied with Thomas Jefferson and the genius of American neoclassicism, the English immigrant Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Mills’s portfolio consisted mostly of elegant Greek Revival churches, including the Sansom Street Baptist Church and the octagonal First Unitarian Church, both in Philadelphia. Later, in 1845, Mills would receive his best-known commission, the Washington Monument.
The “Colossus” was immortalized in countless prints, depicted on Staffordshire dinnerware, and captured the imagination of every traveler to encounter its majestic form. Upon beholding the bridge, the English actress Fanny Kemble wrote that “at a little distance, it looks like a scarf, rounded by the wind, flung over the river.” In 1838, the bridge succumbed to a well-known hazard of wooden architecture. Within minutes, it was destroyed by an arsonist’s torch. “The burning bridge, the crowd upon the hills, and the beautiful scenery in the neighborhood, illuminated by the blaze” reported Philadelphia’s Public Ledger, “presented a splendid picture.”11
The year after the “Colossus” burned, builders completed a bridge across Dunlap’s Creek in Brownsville, south of Pittsburgh. The bridge carried the National Road, which linked Baltimore to Wheeling, West Virginia, and eventually drew together towns across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It was also the first iron-arch bridge built in America. It still stands, carrying what is now U.S. Route 40. Perhaps the builders hoped to avoid the fate of the “Colossus.” Or perhaps, after an earlier wooden bridge collapsed in a snowstorm, they simply decided that the time had come for an American iron bridge.
DEFEATED BY the city that had once done so much to nourish his mind and spirit, in late February 1803, Paine retreated to the home of friends in Bordentown, New Jersey. In the fall, he made his way to his farm in New Rochelle. He hoped to make ends meet by harvesting firewood but his sixty-six-year-old body made this impossible. He spent the winter doing little but fending off the cold and solitude of rural life. The next year, as winter descended, Paine abandoned the countryside for New York City. During the next few years, he would travel back and forth between New Rochelle and New York, suffering increasingly from fits of gout and assorted other symptoms of age. Though he was able to cover some debts and briefly generate income from the sale of part of his New Rochelle property, he was nearly destitute.
A lifetime of refusing remuneration for his writings and building bridges on his own dime had culminated in an old age of terrible poverty and infirmity. Paine’s plan to alleviate precisely this kind of suffering, carefully laid out in Agrarian Justice, his final substantial pamphlet, was a distant dream in the United States. Written in the winter of 1795–1796, a little over a year after Paine’s release from Luxembourg prison, the pamphlet railed against human inequality and was among the first works of political economy to explain poverty as an outgrowth of “that which is called civilized life,” rather than a “natural state.” Paine observed that the Native peoples of America would never recognize the impoverishment of Europe’s poor because “civilization,” whose abundant advantages include “agriculture, arts, science, and manufactures . . . has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched.” The aged, the infirm, children, military veterans, and all the others among society’s disadvantaged had been left behind by the progress of civilization and a chasm now divided society. The solution, for Paine, was taxation. By imposing an inheritance tax on all landed estates, he argued, dynastic wealth would be curbed and society’s most disadvantaged would get the basics that were rightfully theirs.12
Agrarian Justice was written at a hopeful moment for Paine. The ruthless Jacobin regime had been destroyed and a new regime, the Directory, named for its five-person executive committee, controlled France. Meaningful social reform seemed possible. But now, in the early years of the nineteenth century, Paine found himself in a United States with little regard for either its aged poor or its political forebears.
Perhaps the ultimate insult came in the fall of 1806, when Paine returned to New Rochelle to cast his vote in local elections. To his utter horror, the elections supervisor refused to accept the vote on the grounds that Paine was not a citizen of the United States. Even in the village of New Rochelle, there was political gain to be made at the expense of Thomas Paine. Paine hired an attorney to challenge the outrageous claim and began lobbying former New York governor and now Vice President George Clinton to attest to his citizenship. But the case went nowhere. No judge or jury in New York would declare the infidel Paine an American. Paine’s treatment remains astonishing, especially given that his property—the basis for his right to vote—had come directly from New York State itself.
Over the course of the next three years, Paine’s health deteriorated and he stopped going to his farm. His plans to publish his collected works were set aside for want of money and physical capacity. Much as he had in Philadelphia thirty years earlier, he attempted to work his way into New York’s political and literary scene. He published several essays on New York State politics and the naval vulnerabilities of the Port of New York. But these did little for his reputation or his spirits. By early 1808, he was living in a wretched garret on what is now Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. Having spent so much of his time seeking compensation for his service to the United States, and having been repeatedly insulted and rebuffed since his return from France, Paine now refused to seek help. Charity, he had come to believe, was just another instrument through which the powerful held sway over the powerless. A human being’s capacity to live a life of reasonable health and happiness, he had written in Agrarian Justice, should not be left to the whims of well-to-do philanthropists. For it was “but a right, not a bounty but justice,” and by definition, no single person, purely owing to the fortunes of birth or industry, should have the power to determine who should have food on her plate.
The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.13
By the summer of 1808, it was becoming clear that Paine could no longer survive on his own. Friends arranged to have him moved from his rented Fulton Street room to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Ryder in Greenwich, then a separate village a couple of miles north of the city.
The arrangement made for a brief improvement, but during the fall Paine’s condition worsened and by January 1809, the end was near. Paine prepared his final will and testament but death did not come quickly. Over the course of the next months, he suffered with agonizing pain, festering sores on his feet and ankles, and incontinence. It was a miserable decline that finally ended on the morning of June 8. Madame Bonneville, a French émigré whom Paine had befriended in Paris, and whose children he had adopted, accompanied his casket to his farm in New Rochelle. She and her son attended to Paine’s burial and ordered a small tombstone for the private burial plot. Its brief inscription read: “Thomas Paine, Author of ‘Common Sense,’ died the eighth of June, 1809, aged 72 years.”
In the years to come, Paine’s gravesite attracted visitors, all seeking a piece of the great American revolutionary. “Many persons have taken away pieces of the tombstone and of the trees” planted nearby, Madame Bonneville recalled. “Foreigners especially have been eager to obtain these memorials, some of which have been sent to England. They have been put in frames and preserved [and] verses in honor of Paine have been written on the head stone.”14