Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (47 page)

A historical marker in New Rochelle reads:

That first line alone is both wrong and outdated. The marker does
not
stand over the original grave site, and while Paine indeed “was buried” near here in 1809, his remains were stolen ten years later by an English journalist named William Cobbett and never recovered. Paine’s grave has been empty for two hundred years, and how this came to be is a tale worthy of elaboration.

A former critic of Paine’s turned fanatical admirer, Cobbett was appalled that his newfound hero had been treated so shabbily at life’s end by the very nation Paine had helped rouse to freedom decades before with the January 1776 publication of
Common Sense
, Paine’s impassioned call to arms against the British. The pamphlet sold 500,000 copies during the Revolution, a mind-blowing number considering that the country’s entire population was only 2.5 million and many folks were illiterate. No other book except the Bible has been read by a larger percentage of Americans. And when the Continental Army edged perilously close to defeat in December 1776, Paine churned out a series of publications titled
The Crisis
to lift the country’s spirits. “These are the
times that try men’s souls,” he famously proclaimed in the first essay, which was composed in the shivering cold at Fort Trenton. (Paine had enlisted as a soldier, but George Washington personally decided that the thirty-year-old pamphleteer would better serve his country by writing, not fighting. Paine donated his substantial profits from
The Crisis
to buy clothes and supplies for the Army’s ill-equipped and hungry troops.) Washington rallied his embattled men with Paine’s words and credited him with helping to turn the tide of the war in America’s favor.

In 1781, Congress appointed Paine to complete Henry Laurens’s diplomatic mission to Europe after Laurens was captured at sea and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Accompanied by Laurens’s son, Colonel John Laurens, Paine helped convince France to lend the colonies $10 million and provide troops and warships, which proved indispensable in forcing Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

In 1794 and ’95, Paine released a withering two-volume critique of organized religion titled
The Age of Reason
. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish [i.e., Muslim],” Paine wrote, “appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Whatever goodwill Paine had earned during the Revolution evaporated instantly. Congress refused to fund his pension, he was denied the right to vote, and former allies ostracized him entirely.

During a visit to the States, William Cobbett made a pilgrimage to Paine’s grave in New Rochelle and couldn’t believe what he found. “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America,” he reported in his journal. “There, however,
he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer
. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will.”

So, in October 1819, William Cobbett dug up Thomas Paine’s remains, packed them in a crate, and shipped them to Great Britain. He hadn’t even bothered to backfill the grave, apparently figuring no one would care. He was right. Local authorities noticed the mound of
dirt, launched a halfhearted search, and then dropped the investigation altogether.

Upon returning home, Cobbett announced his intention to build an extravagant memorial for Paine and organize a lavish funeral in his honor, which he would finance by parading Paine’s bones around England and charging the public a fee to glimpse them. The plan was ill conceived from the start. Paine was more despised in his native country than in America, and some towns were still burning him in effigy once a year. The British poet Lord Byron summed up the public mood when he chided:

Stuck with these very bones, Cobbett eventually stashed them inside a trunk under his bed. In 1835, Cobbett passed away, bankrupt, and left his family in dire financial straits. His son tried to auction off Paine’s remains to the highest bidder, but the estate auctioneer refused to sell human bones on principle, and no one knows what happened to them next. Possibly they were buried in a nearby churchyard. Or piece by piece they ended up in different hands. A Unitarian clergyman insisted in 1854 that he had Paine’s skull and finger bones, and Benjamin Tilly, Cobbett’s secretary, is said to have extracted part of Paine’s brain. The hardened, puttylike matter made its way back to America in 1905 and was placed inside a statue of Paine erected in New Rochelle. As to where the rest of Paine ended up, it’s anyone’s guess.

Were John Adams alive today, he’d be appalled to see two laudatory quotes attributed to him inscribed on Paine’s memorial. There’s no proof that Adams ever wrote or uttered the comment exalting Paine’s pen over Washington’s sword, and the second quotation is taken wholly out of context. Factually speaking, Adams did state, in a June 1819 letter to Thomas Jefferson, that “history is to ascribe the American
Revolution to Thomas Paine.” In truth, far from praising him, Adams was
complaining
that Paine would be remembered so fondly. Three sentences earlier in his letter, Adams had referred to
Common Sense
as an “ignorant, malicious, short-sighted crapulous mass.” That somehow didn’t make it onto the memorial.

While Steven takes pictures of Daniel Boone’s grave and circles the iron fence to inspect the site, making sure everything’s in good condition, I wander off to check out the neighbors. A few rows away is old Mason Brown, whose visit to Mount Auburn inspired this cemetery. Farther up, my eye zeroes in on a name that practically leaps off its headstone:
BLACKBURN
.

Maybe it’s not the same Blackburn I’m thinking of, I say to myself, but upon approaching the grave, I see that, yes, indeed, it’s Luke P. Blackburn, former governor of Kentucky. His granite marker is more elaborate than Boone’s, with four miniature Doric columns carved in the middle, all sorts of architectural flourishes, and a decorative “roof” on top that looks like a hybrid of Roman and Asian influences. Underneath that is a bronze bas-relief of the Good Samaritan parable.

Associating Blackburn with such charity is either a suitable homage or an inexcusable abomination, depending on one’s perspective, and it reinforces how vexing it can be to render an opinion on a historical figure’s life and legacy. Before entering politics, Blackburn had earned a medical degree at Kentucky’s Transylvania University and went on to gain national praise for treating, on a pro bono basis, yellow-fever victims in the South between 1848 and 1854. He also contributed his own money to build a hospital in an impoverished area of Mississippi and successfully lobbied Congress to fund additional ones throughout the state. In 1854 he traveled to Philadelphia to secure an apprenticeship for his teenage son with the renowned Dr. Samuel Gross (the same Dr. Gross whose request to be cremated gave the cremationist movement an air of respectability). Later that year yellow fever hit Long Island, and once again, Blackburn volunteered to care for the afflicted without compensation. He was elected Kentucky’s governor in 1879
by a political landslide but quickly grew unpopular because he instituted sweeping reforms that improved living conditions for prisoners. Nicknamed “Lenient Luke,” Blackburn issued more than a thousand pardons and was literally booed off the political stage at the end of his term for being too compassionate.

That was Luke Blackburn, the humanitarian.

Then there’s Luke Blackburn, the terrorist.

During the Civil War, Blackburn was the Confederate sympathizer who gathered up contaminated bedsheets and garments from yellow-fever victims in Bermuda and tried using them to spread an epidemic throughout Northern cities. He failed solely because the disease is not, as he’d assumed, contagious (again, mosquitoes are the vectors), a blunder that doesn’t negate his desire to kill thousands of innocent civilians.

How do we remember such a man? In all of Kentucky there’s only one major public tribute to Blackburn I’m aware of, and it’s a prison outside of Lexington called the Blackburn Correctional Complex. Considering his record, that seems rather fitting.

Steve and I meet up at his truck, and after we drive out of the cemetery I realize I’ve yet to get his personal verdict on where Daniel Boone is buried.

When I ask him, he smiles at first. “That’s a tricky question,” he says. “I have to be careful because I’m friends with Boone’s ancestors and there’s disagreement among the family members.”

Steve considers his reply carefully and finally says to me, “Well, it’s not an answer that will make everyone happy, but I think Boone is in both places.”

“Hmm,” I say, giving the mental machinery a moment to process this. “So when the Kentucky folks took his remains, they mistakenly left some behind?”

“Exactly. Everyone agrees he was dug up pretty quickly, and there were hundreds of bones mixed together in that plot. Odds are that some were picked up and some stayed in Missouri.”

“Nothing I’ve read about Boone has mentioned this. But … that definitely makes a lot of sense.”

Steve concedes it’s just a theory and the debate will probably never be resolved. DNA tests are exorbitantly expensive, and by now Boone’s bones are probably too degraded to offer any conclusive results. Regional pride and, to be frank, tourist dollars also make it doubtful that either state would allow a disinterment and risk losing its claim to being Daniel Boone’s
true
final resting place. The folks who dug up “Jesse James” in Granbury, Texas, discovered that the hard way.

“At the beginning of this whole journey,” I say to Steve, “I had expected to find these grand ‘lessons of history’ everywhere I went, but in a lot of cases it seems that there’s little we can really know for certain, like with Boone. We can’t even confirm when he was born and where he’s buried, and it casts doubt on everything in between.”

“I wouldn’t say that at all,” Steve replies. “Maybe we can’t verify every detail, but Boone’s life speaks for itself, for the kind of man he was. He didn’t swing from tree vines like Tarzan, the way Flint writes in his book, but he was a skilled pioneer who blazed the Wilderness Road and traveled thousands of miles over dangerous lands throughout his lifetime. From this alone we can assume he was an incredibly brave and resourceful man.”

Steve’s admiration for Boone, I realize, is no different from mine for the paleo-Indians Dr. Dennis Jenkins has been studying in Paisley, Oregon, and we know less about them than about Boone. On a broader level, I also understand that history can be recorded and relayed only in shorthand. We can’t qualify every statement with “Now, this might turn out to be false” or “As far as we know …” The effect would be maddening. And second-guessing everyone who tries to share a historical anecdote by constantly interrupting, “What’s your source on that?” is probably an excellent way of getting punched at a cocktail party.

But when historical references become more than just grist for idle conversation, when they are cited to influence public policy or shape legislation, they deserve to be scrutinized and challenged. While our inquiries might not always lead to perfect answers, they help us to ask better questions and keep us alert to how easily facts can be twisted,
ideas taken out of context, and legendary figures manipulated to promote a particular social or political cause.

What specific guidance the past offers us has been debated since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides in the fifth century
B.C.
, and for every George Santayana–like sentiment proclaiming that historical knowledge will lead us away from repeating the mistakes of yesteryear, there’s an equally persuasive argument cautioning that it might also present us with false beacons.

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation,” historian Simon Schama wrote in
Dead Certainties
, a book I recently read because it includes a novella inspired by George Parkman’s murder at Harvard. “We are doomed,” Schama concludes, “to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”

I’m keeping an open mind and still seeking out those larger lessons, but for now, Schama’s observation sounds about right. I would only add that the chase itself is half the fun.