The public denial of his citizenship at the polls depressed Paine enough for him to give up the struggle with his drinking problem and to succumb again to the bottle. According to Cheetham, Paine spent the spring of 1806 shifting from lodging to lodging in New Rochelle, his hosts evicting him on account of his drunkenness and unhygienic habits. Of one of them, Cheetham claimed that ‘Mrs Dean made a stout resistance, but at her husband's solicitation, and on Paine's promise that he would not stay long, he was permitted to enter the house. He brought with him a gallon of New-England rum and in the evening got so drunk that he fell from his chair, broke his nose, and sprinkled the room with his blood. At the end of the week Mr Dean insisted that he should leave the house’.

At the beginning of June Paine's friend William Carver, presumably having heard rumours of Paine's behaviour, went to New Rochelle to take him back to New York. He found him in a tavern, unshaven and unwashed. After having him scrubbed and dressed in clean clothes, Carver took him to his own house in Cedar Street. There, about 25 July, Paine was ‘struck with a fit of apoplexy that deprived me of all sense and motion. I had neither pulse nor breathing, and the people about me supposed me dead’.