The Rage Around Tom Paine [ 41 ] ing and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights?"14 This vicious language was only a mild preview of the calumny ahead for Paine and his Presidential benefactor. Joseph Dennie's Philadelphia Port Folio jumped into the fray with all editorial guns trained on the Jacobin quarry: If, during the present season of national abasement, infatuation, folly and vice, any portent could surprise, sober men would be utterly confounded, by an article, current in all our papers, that the loathsome Thomas Paine, a drunken atheist, and the scavenger of faction, is invited to return in a national ship, to America, by the first magistrate of a free people! A measure, so enormously preposterous, we cannot yet believe has been adopted, and it would demand firmer nerves, than those, possessed by Mr. Jefferson, to hazard such an insult to the moral sense of the nation.15 From the first, the virulence of the attack by the Federalist press indicated that the return of Thomas Paine was to be treated as a purely partisan issue, the first great cause celebre of Jefferson's administration. Indeed, in the thunderous roll of abuse lightened by flashes of vindictive humor, the figure of Paine himself almost became lost in the verbal histrionics. Such a fuss over the little fellow whom even the Gazette of the United States dismissed as a "revolutionary bantam" revealed that this was partisan warfare without quarter. It seemed a harsh fate for the essentially gentle man who had confided to a friend before leaving Paris, "I had rather see my horse, Button, eating the grass of Bordentown, or Morrissania [sic], than see all the pomp and show of Europe!'16 Thomas Paine was but a pawn in the game, however. As the groundswell of protest increased against his return under any circumstances—and especially in a government ship—the National Intelligencer, which had unleashed the hounds of party malevolence in its seemingly innocuous reprint of Jefferson's letter of invitation on July 15,1801, noted the reaction with dismay two weeks later: 14Quoted in W. E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America's Godfather, 1737-180Q (New York: i945),309- 1!>The Port Folio, I (July 18, 1801), 231. 16 Gazette of the United States, August 8, 1801; Gilbert Vale, The Life of Thomas Paine ... (New York: 1841), 127.