Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (review)

Gilbert Imlay was a shadowy figure in the background of the worldremaking events of the late eighteenth century. Born in New Jersey in 1754, he served in the American Revolution, participated in the Kentucky land bubble of the 1780s, dabbled in the slave trade, rose to prominence as a radical author in London in the 1790s, profited in Paris as a purveyor to the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, and spent three stormy years as Mary Wollstonecraft’s wayward lover. As Wil Verhoeven portrays him, he was “by no means a major historical figure in his own right,” but he moved in exalted circles and had an uncanny ability to be present at major historical crossroads. The common thread in Imlay’s life was that he was “[i]n many ways a prototype of the American conman,” whose mobility allowed him to constantly reinvent himself “on the murky margins” of the Atlantic world (1). Verhoeven’s book is the first full-length biography of Imlay, and it carefully illuminates this theme.

Verhoeven divides Imlay’s life into three epochs. The first section, “America,” discusses his youth in war-torn Monmouth County, his service in the Continental Army, and his years as a speculator in land and slaves. It was in Kentucky that Imlay first revealed his abilities as a “conman and accomplice” to the grand schemers and speculators of the era (68). Verhoeven’s reconstruction from court records of Imlay’s complicated and fraudulent dealings is an archival tour de force. The second section, “England,” traces Imlay’s career as a novelist and authority on the American west during the Revolution Controversy in London. His reinvented himself in print as a Jacobin philosopher and reformer who promoted a radical vision of social utopia in the western wilderness. Here Verhoeven shows his scholarly virtuosity by seamlessly shifting research strategies to a painstaking history of the book methodology. The final section, “France,” recounts Imlay’s sojourn in revolutionary France, where he joined many of his radical British cohorts in supporting the revolutionary cause. In Paris, Imlay plotted with the Girondists to retake Louisiana for the cause of the revolution, participated in dangerous but highly profitable blockade running with a clique of radical British and American merchants, and romanced Wollstonecraft. After the implosion of their relationship in 1796, Imlay’s near-total disappearance from the historical record stumps even an intrepid researcher such as Verhoeven. He died in obscurity on the Island of Jersey in 1828.

The chief payoff of Verhoeven’s careful reconstruction of Imlay’s life is that it brings a much-needed subtlety to interpretations of the founding generation. As Nancy Isenberg has recently pointed out in Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007), historians have tended to view the founders in stark moral terms and their political struggles as conflicts between good and evil. In Verhoeven’s deft hands, a liminal figure like Imlay was both radical and revanchist, cultural critic and conman, patriot and profiteer—and never a hypocrite. He was an American patriot at the same time that he tried, with questionable honesty, to profit from the aftermath of the Revolution in Kentucky. He subscribed to the higher ideals of the French Revolution while exploiting the excesses of Robespierre. He supported the rights of women as he abandoned their most articulate enumerator with a two-year-old daughter. In all of this, Verhoeven convincingly argues, he “was in many ways a paradigmatic figure of his time” (4). His complex portrait of Imlay can teach us much about a late eighteenth-century world in which political ideals and the profit motive were often two sides of the same coin.

The same intimacy with his subject that allows Verhoeven to draw broader meaning from Imlay’s life also renders his account troubling at times. Overall, Verhoeven is very free with his language, which occasionally leads him to overstep his otherwise judicious argument. His willingness to take Imlay at...