After waving his friend farewell, Clio Rickman wrote verses expressing the hope that the sea would be calm and the wind light:

In fact Paine was to receive a turbulent reception in America. ‘You can have no idea of the agitation which my arrival occasioned from New Hampshire to Georgia’, he informed Rickman, ‘every newspaper was filled with applause or abuse’. The abuse had begun before he arrived. Jefferson's letter offering to ship him back in a federal vessel had been leaked to the press, probably by Paine himself. This had provided an opportunity for Federalist papers to attack the Republican president for befriending a ‘loathsome reptile’, ‘an obscene old sinner’, ‘that lying, drunken, brutal infidel’ and ‘that living opprobrium of humanity, TOM PAINE’. Thus prepared, his opponents ensured that he got a hostile reception when he went ashore at Baltimore on 30 October. ‘Tom upon his landing, immediately proceeded with a fellow passenger to the principal inn’, recorded an eyewitness, ‘but to the honour of the Landlord he would not give him admittance. He then try'd another inn, but met with the same reception.