[ 38 ] JERRY W. KNUDSON some Americans forget Paine's bitter attack in 1796 on their prime hero in his Letter to George Washington, President of the United States of America, on Affairs Public and Private.4 So it was that Thomas Paine, unknowingly facing such opposition, bade "adieu to restless and wretched Europe" and turned his vision westward once more. The times were auspicious for his homecoming: Thomas Jefferson had been elected third President of the United States, and a new order was clearly in the air for the young country. Paine had written to Jefferson from Paris on June 9,1801: "I congratulate America on your election. There has been no circumstance with respect to America since the times of her Revolution that excited so much attention and expectation in France, England, Ireland and Scotland as the pending election for President of the United States, nor any of which the event has given more general joy!'5 William M. Van der Weyde, editor of one of the editions (1925) of the works of Thomas Paine, has written that "there is no evidence that Paine met with an actual open hostility on the part of his fellow-countrymen during the first years after his return!'6 Nothing could be further from the truth. From the first moment it became known that Jefferson had offered the author of the Age of Reason return passage on the warship Maryland until Thomas Paine's death on June 8,1809, there was little peace for Paine or the Jefferson administration. The clouds of controversy began to gather when Paine wrote to Jefferson on October 1,1800, "If any American frigate should come to France and the direction of it fall to you, I will be glad if you would give me the opportunity of returning!' Jefferson's reply of March 18, 1801, written only two weeks after he had assumed the Presidency, was destined to become "one of the most famous documents of the de- New Bochelle, N.Y.: 1925), VIII, 4. There is no adequate edition of Paine's writings. Alfred Owen Aldridge, "Thomas Paine and the New York Public Advertiser',' The New- York Historical Society Quarterly, XXXVII (October 1953), 361-82, demonstrates some of the omissions and errors of Philip Sheldon Foner's The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (2 vols.; New York: 1945). 4 See the Gazette of the United States & Daily Advertiser for July 16 and 21, 1801 and the Philadelphia Aurora. General Advertiser for July 14, August 3 and 7, 1801. 6 Paine to Consul Botch, July 8,1802 (probably his last letter from Paris before sailing for America) and Paine to Jefferson, June 9, 1801, Van der Weyde, ed., The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, I, 421, 420. * Ibid., 445.