Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,416

This is the grave of John Howard Payne.

Born in 1791 in New York City, Payne grew up in a well-off family. They had old colonial roots and he mostly grew up in Boston, where his father ran a school. From the time he was a kid, Payne was very interested in drama. This was horrifying for his family, as that was not exactly seen as a good way to make a living or a path to a respectable life. Payne’s father stuck him in an accounting business but the kid loathed it and was also terrible at it. A good moment to remember that the whole STEM mentality basically says that half the smart kids’ brains today don’t actually have value because they aren’t interested in specific questions that serve the interests of capitalism or the state and also have no interest in being a cog in a capitalist society. Wasn’t necessarily that different 200 years ago, sadly.

Payne started writing plays as a teen and actually got a fairly racy one put on in New York in 1805. He was also a superb theater critic, starting to publish the same year and it was good enough that it got the attention of the city’s leading cultural lights. So William Coleman, editor of the New York Evening Post put together some rich people to send Payne to college. This gets kind of funny because of the reasons they chose Union College, up in Schenectady. Evidently, Payne was already highly attracted to the ladies of New York theater and his mentors rightfully worried that if he could hang around these women all the time, he wouldn’t actually study. So they wouldn’t send him to Columbia or even to Princeton. Nope, to the boonies with you!

Well, it didn’t stick. When his mother died in 1807, Payne bailed. He hated Schenectady and resented not being allowed to be in New York. So he dropped out, moved to the city, and went into acting. He was an immediate success. Within just a couple of years, he was the first American born actor to play Hamlet in a major production of the play. He was also Romeo with Edgar Allan Poe‘s mother Eliza as Juliet. Having conquered New York by 1813, Payne sailed to London to try his luck in the center of the English speaking theater world. He would stay in Europe until 1832. He did quite well on the stage both in London and in Paris. If he wasn’t quite the phenom he was in New York, well, he was accepted where it mattered. He made a good bit of money translating French plays into English.

Payne also spent money constantly too. While in England, he had one huge success and this is what he is most known for today, if he is really known at all. He wrote a song in an 1823 opera titled “Home Sweet Home.” This became an international hit in the sheet music era. The lyrics were the typical, sentimental maudlin stuff of the time:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there
Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere
Home! Home!
Sweet, sweet home!
There’s no place like home
There’s no place like home!

An exile from home splendor dazzles in vain
Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again
The birds singing gaily that came at my call
And gave me the peace of mind dearer than all
Home, home, sweet, sweet home
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!

But let’s face it, that spoke to a lot of people, especially in an era when you couldn’t just hop a plane and visit your family. It sold 100,000 copies in the first year. Payne spent all that money as fast as it came in. The song later had a revival in the 1850s and was hugely popular among soldiers on both sides of the Civil War in the 1860s. The song was recorded by Bing Crosby, featured in The King of Siam, and is still sometimes recorded today.

In 1832, Payne returned to the U.S. He didn’t have much money. His friends held a benefit concert to get him back on his feet. But he did have powerful friends. Payne got really interested in the rural parts of America. He and John James Audubon toured the nation. Payne got very interested in the Cherokee. So he went down to north Georgia in 1836 to get to know them better. This was at the very moment when Georgia was more than happy to commit genocide against that tribe if the federal government didn’t kick them out. I will note here that this is always worth remembering when discussing Native history. The government was terrible, but the actual white settlers? They were full-fledged supporters of genocide and not in some abstract way. Nope, they were wanting to pull the trigger themselves. So when Payne went down there, the Georgia militia arrested him for sedition against the state. He got out of prison when he heard some soldier was singing “Home Sweet Home” and Payne was like, hey, I wrote that song! So they let him go because he was famous.

Well, this only made Payne more pro-Cherokee and he became a major figure in political circles advocating for the tribe before, during, and after removal. He was pretty nutty in some of this. For example, much of his interest was rooted in his belief that the Cherokee were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. So that’s what he wanted to prove. Still, the tribes had so few white advocates that it didn’t hurt. Moreover, he took very complete notes on everything he saw on the Cherokee, so even though his motives were weird, his notes are still an important set of evidence about the 19th century Cherokee.

Now, Payne tried to get back involved in the American literary and theater scene, but without too much success. He was completely reliant on his famous friends, including Washington Irving, with whom he was close. In fact, at the end of his time in Europe, Payne fell in love with Mary Shelley, but he then realized she only tolerated him because she was half in love with Irving and knew she could get to him through his friend. So people like Irving and Audubon helped and his song made him famous with other powerful people, such as Daniel Webster and William Marcy. Through their intercession, John Tyler named Payne American Consul to Tunis, a very minor post, but one that paid and one that it helped to have someone who at least understood the world in. I don’t know that Payne really did much there, but he remained in Tunis most of the rest of his life, dying there in 1852, at the age of 60.

John Howard Payne is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C. The story here is that in 1883, the rich guy and lover of Payne’s music W.W. Corcoran (yep, Corcoran Gallery guy) paid to have Payne’s remains removed from Tunis and brought back to the U.S. Since Corcoran had also founded the cemetery, it made sense for his hero to be interred there.

If you would like this series to visit other 19th century theater figures, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edwin Forrest is in Philadelphia and Royall Tyler is in Brattleboro, Vermont. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.