PrC (DLC).

Late in November, after receiving the above letter, Paine wrote to his friend John Hall: “I have received a letter from Mr. Jefferson who mentioned the great run [Rights of Man] has had there. It has been attacked by John Adams, who has brought an host about his ears from all parts of the Continent. Mr. Jefferson has sent me twenty-five different answers to Adams who wrote under the name of Publicola” (Paine to Hall, 25 Nov. 1791, Philip S. Foner, The complete writings of Thomas Paine, ii [New York, 1945], 1322). Paine’s misrepresentation of TJ’s letter led David F. Hawke, Paine, p. 234, to the conclusion that TJ, in spreading rumor for fact about the authorship of the Publicola essays, had done his friend Adams a great disservice. This gossip, he added, “sealed Paine’s hatred of Adams and Paine ever after pursued Adams with the ferocity he usually reserved for kings.” Paine, however, needed no prompting on this score. He had long since joined TJ, Rush, and others in thinking that Adams had changed his political principles since 1776. Indeed, at this time, Paine boasted: “I had John Adams in my mind when I wrote [Rights of Man] and it has hit as I expected” (Paine to William Short, 2 Nov. 1791, Foner, Writings of Paine, ii, 1320, from RC in PHi). Far from identifying Adams as Publicola in the above letter, TJ carefully concealed his opinion on the subject, thereby silently defining the limits of his confidence in Paine’s discretion.

Surprisingly, it was William Short’s breach of TJ’s confidence which enabled Paine to give Hall the erroneous impression that John Adams was Publicola. On the day before TJ wrote the above letter, he gave Short a brief account of the enthusiastic reception of Paine’s pamphlet, the attack on it by “a writer under the name of Publicola,” and the response “by a host of republican volunteers.” He also expressed his fear that “the honestest man of the party will fall a victim to his imprudence on this occasion”—an expression which pointed unmistakably to Adams. But even with a correspondent in whom he had implicit confidence, TJ took pains to encode the passage of his letter naming Adams as first among those hoping “to make way for a king, lords and commons” in the United States (TJ to Short, 28 July 1791). Short sent to Paine a copy of this private letter and also forwarded to him the collection of anti-Publicola clippings from Bache’s General Advertiser (Paine to Short, 2 Nov. 1791, Foner, Writings of Paine, ii, 1320). From TJ’s letter to Short and from these clippings, Paine drew the inference that John Adams was Publicola and passed the unfounded supposition on to his friend Hall. He also gave him the false impression that it was TJ himself who had sent him the anti-Publicola pieces.

Paine’s “Thoughts on the Establishment of a Mint” was enclosed in his letter to TJ of 28 Sep. 1790 and is printed there. When Paine next wrote, he did not mention receipt of the above letter or comment on TJ’s suggestion, perhaps because he was so disturbed over the appointment of Gouverneur Morris as minister to France (Paine to TJ, 13 Feb. 1792). In the meantime, TJ made the essay on the mint available to Freneau, who published it in the National Gazette, 17 Nov. 1791. The original manuscript has not been found, and so the names that TJ deleted cannot be known with certainty, but these must have included that of Robert Morris, whose plan for coinage had been criticized by TJ. The name of Gouverneur Morris, who had written on the subject, may also have appeared in the text (see Editorial Note and group of documents on coinage, at end of Apr. 1784).