- 9 The Terror
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CHAPTER NINE
The Terror
The National Convention began debating Louis XVI’s fate before Barlow and Frost delivered the address of the Society for Constitutional Information but did not try the king and sentence him to death until January 16 and 17, 1793. His execution took place on January 21, initiating the judicial bloodletting for political crimes for which the French Revolution became notorious. According to Gouverneur Morris, Parisians had such mixed feelings about the king’s execution that a large detachment of troops was required to insure it took place. Morris thought “the great Mass of the parisian Citizens mourn’d the Fate of their unhappy Prince.”1 But it was not clear whether they wept for the king or for the dangerous future his execution promised. A declaration of war by France against Britain and Holland followed on February 1. With Girondin backing, Charles Dumouriez invaded the Netherlands, initiating a war with Britain that would last for the next twenty-two years with only one interruption.
A worried Ruth wrote Barlow from London on January 28, 1793 to report that his affairs with Johnson “are all a wreck” due to governmental repression and popular intimidation. She was more anxious than ever to return home and announced her intention to take ship for America in the spring.2 Barlow replied, “Leave before me to return to our homeland! No, never.” He did not usually address her so emphatically and took the trouble of sending this letter in duplicate to make sure she received it. If he won election, which was unlikely, she would join him in France. Otherwise, they would sail together from Le Havre for America in the early spring.3
When he returned to Paris at the beginning of March, he learned that the National Convention had conferred French citizenship upon him. Barlow was one of three foreigners honored with formal naturalization (as opposed to honorary citizenship), just as foreigners in general became the objects of xenophobic suspicion.4 He celebrated this distinction by becoming involved in a Girondin scheme for reacquiring Louisiana from Spain.5 Barlow hailed France’s declaration of war against Spain on March 7, 1793, as an auspicious preliminary to “the liberation of the Spanish Colonies.” He saw the French acquisition of Louisiana, like that of Savoy, as furthering the cause of liberty. Now that France was a republic, a French Louisiana would secure “peace with our neighbours.”6 His enthusiasm for the United States and France sharing a frontier revealed how uncritically he viewed the Girondins. In Barlow’s estimate their attempts to expand the dimensions of France promised to reinforce the nation’s republicanism by diminishing the power of Paris.
Barlow’s initial introduction to the Louisiana scheme was through two American adventurers, Stephen Sayre and Gilbert Imlay, who used the clichés of revolutionary republicanism to promote their own interests. In conception, the scheme owed much more to the Latin American visionary Francisco de Miranda. A Venezuelan Creole by birth, Miranda had been radicalized while serving with the Spanish army during the American Revolutionary War. He emerged from that struggle determined to replace Spain’s Latin American empire with a continental republic. During the 1780s Miranda wandered, first to the United States and then all over Europe, looking for allies to promote his dream. After Louis XVI’s unsuccessful attempt to flee his kingdom, France’s political instability drew Miranda there. When, with the fall of the monarchy, defending the republic took precedence over everything else, Miranda volunteered to serve with Dumouriez. There he remained until Sayre, whom he had previously met, recommended the Girondins consult him about destroying Spain’s power in America.7
Miranda’s charisma and his view of the Spanish empire as a house of cards led the French government to instruct Edmund Genêt, the new ambassador to the United States, to promote such an enterprise. The impending French declaration of war against Spain led to further elaborations on the Louisiana scheme after Genêt’s departure. On March 4, 1793, Sayre, with two French partners, proposed raising a Franco-American force in the Ohio Valley that would descend the Mississippi to seize New Orleans. They expected Spain’s hold on Louisiana, Florida, and Mexico to quickly crumble in response. George Rogers Clark, who during the American Revolution had managed to wage wilderness warfare across daunting distances, had already been approached about leading such a force. Sayre’s job was to arrange for the provisions Clark’s army would consume, while Barlow would recruit French settlers in the West.8
On March 5, Barlow wrote Ruth enthusiastically about the new venture, assuring her it would “suit you my love much better & me too, because it will carry us both home.”9 But a Frenchman from New Orleans named Pierre Lyonnet, who had the ear of the government, questioned Barlow’s knowledge of the Mississippi region and pointed to his controversial standing among those he was supposed to recruit. Barlow was not especially disappointed to be excused from participating in the plan because he was still uncertain about returning to America after the Scioto fiasco. In any case, Ruth’s health proved too problematic that spring to make definite commitments and hampered her efforts to wind up Barlow’s affairs in Britain.
Barlow was particularly concerned about a manuscript, which would evolve into Part II of Advice to the Privileged Orders, that had been left in Joseph Johnson’s possession. He described it “as a work of great labour & of particular value to me” and wanted Johnson to have the manuscript copied so that the Barlows could take one copy home with them without risking its total loss. There were several other business matters needing closure, including a bond for three hundred livres “in French” and “endorsed on the back—William Playfair.” His former nemesis, sensing advantage, had joined the bandwagon of English reaction in warning of the dangers the French Revolution posed, and Barlow relished the possibility of putting the bond into suit. Ruth was also to pack up all their possessions and deliver them to a fellow Yale graduate, Mark Leavenworth, for shipment to America.10
Leavenworth had been six years ahead of Barlow at Yale; his younger brother, Nathan, had been Barlow’s classmate. Despite the heady idealism pervading revolutionary France, Barlow could not forget he was far from rich, and Leavenworth assumed increasing importance as his business partner. The letters Barlow wrote to Ruth during the winter and spring of 1793 repeatedly mention Leavenworth, with whom he shared the hope of profiting from the war between France and Britain. Barlow’s straitened circumstances led him to nurture this relationship, which would remain important to him in the years ahead.
Fortunately for the United States, France’s attempt to reacquire Louisiana never got off the ground. Its best chance lay in the Girondins’ continued dominance of the National Convention. However, an internal crisis that began with a revolt in the Vendée and eventually spread to seven western departments eroded the Girondins’ political base in the provinces. By posing a choice between chaos and the power of the central government, the crisis weakened those who represented the periphery while strengthening the Montagnards. The Girondins’ first response to the revolt in the Vendée was to bring suspected traitors before a revolutionary tribunal that the National Convention established on March 10, 1793, but their timing could not have been worse. On March 18, Dumouriez, to whom they had entrusted the defense of the Republic, was imprisoned by the Austrians in the wake of a decisive defeat at Neewinden. After failing to persuade his army to turn on France, Dumouriez joined the allied cause.
These developments played into the hands of the Montagnards. On April 5, 1793, they proposed that the National Convention endow a committee of public safety with extraordinary powers to oversee the executive and thereby defend the revolution. When the Convention accepted the proposal, control of the French government began to slip from the hands of Brissot de Warville and his allies. In a desperate attempt to recoup lost ground, the Girondins had the demagogue Jean-Paul Marat, who had just become president of the Jacobin Club, arrested for trial before the revolutionary tribunal. Thirty-five of the city’s forty-eight sections responded by petitioning the Convention to proscribe twenty-two Girondin leaders, including Brissot. When the revolutionary tribunal acquitted Marat, buckling to the pressure of eight thousand sansculottes surrounding the Convention as much as to the flimsiness of the charges against him, Girondin influence in the Convention declined further.
Realizing that a fault line was opening between the sansculottes of Paris and the rest of the nation, the Girondins tried to strike at the Montagnards’ base by creating a Committee of Twelve to investigate the activities of the Commune. Their initiative backfired, however, when the Committee of Twelve was forced to release Jacques-René Hébert and Jean-François Varlet, whose arrest it had ordered, to head off a citywide insurrection. An uprising of the Paris sections at the end of May compelled the Convention to expel twenty-nine Girondins, thereby assuring Montagnard ascendancy. In the midst of such turmoil, the project of reacquiring Louisiana from Spain was forgotten. The Montagnards control of the National Convention increased markedly in response to revolts at Caen, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulon, and Bordeaux and was further confirmed by the assassination of Marat in July 1793. They were more than happy to comply with Washington’s request that Genêt be recalled after his aggressive attempts to promote the reacquisition of Louisiana had compromised U.S. neutrality.
Barlow’s reputation as a poet and ideologue had begun to win him entry into the cosmopolitan community drawn to Paris as the center of international republicanism. He became a welcome guest in the salon of Helen Maria Williams. Though initially it differed from the great Parisian salons by catering to a clientele largely composed of radicals known as the British Club,11 Girondin leaders were soon frequenting it as a refuge from the rising pressure of their Jacobin opponents.12 Barlow was now at the center of a world to which he had previously been marginal, though he could not forget this milieu presumed an independent living he still lacked.13 A childless marriage diminished the demands on his resources, but the Barlows still had no regular income.
His new circumstances required him increasingly to choose between his former friends and the revolution. During the spring of 1793 he made a serious effort to return home, but obstacles besides Ruth’s health intervened. Beginning in April the expanding war temporarily cut off communication between Britain and the continent. That raised questions about whether proceeding together across the Atlantic was possible. “If you cannot come soon, we must submit to the cruel necessity of going in different ships to America,” he wrote on April 5, urging her to exert herself to the utmost. Shortly afterward he received Ruth’s letter of March 26. It has not survived, but Barlow described it as containing a “refusal to come to me.” From his response, it would appear she was worried about the disorders in Paris, the revolt in the Vendée, and the widening European war. Barlow claimed that “you would have been perfectly safe here” had “the passage [not] been shut.” He also stressed how disappointed Mary Wollstonecraft was that Ruth had remained in Britain. Now that the Barlows were again contemplating returning to the United States, Wollstonecraft hoped they would assist her brother Charles, who had gone to Ohio.14
Before agreeing to return home separately, Barlow sent Col. Benjamin Hichborn to London to confer with Ruth. A native of Massachusetts and Harvard graduate, Hichborn had taken a prominent role in revolutionary Massachusetts. Subsequently, he became interested in a canal scheme to connect the Connecticut River with Massachusetts Bay and in 1792 undertook a tour of Britain and France to inspect the latest canal technology. Barlow predicted that Hichborn “will be one of the tenderest friends you ever had” and “will tell you precisely what is best to be done, & will bring you here if you think it best.”15 In other words, Barlow was sending Hichborn to fetch her. Ruth’s consolation was that Barlow unambiguously wanted her to join him. His frequent references to Mary Wollstonecraft’s disappointment over Ruth’s continued absence were simply bait to which Barlow added a bit of gossip: “Between you & me—you must not hint it to her nor to J[ohnso]n nor to any one else—I believe she has got a sweet heart—and that she will finish by going with him to A[meric]a as a wife.” Two weeks later Barlow reported that Mary wanted Ruth to “take lodgings with her at Meudon 5 miles from town.” Neither Barlow realized that they were witnessing the beginning of Wollstonecraft’s doomed involvement with Gilbert Imlay.16
Ruth was right to sense that she was being summoned to France at an inauspicious time. Not only was the economy in crisis, but, as the Republic’s military fortunes worsened, France grew more intolerant of the foreigners in her midst. On March 21, 1793, responding to a general scare about the presence of British spies in the capital, the National Convention ordered the sections to elect committees to place aliens under surveillance. This failed to deter Barlow from joining nineteen others associated with the British Club in supporting the effort to identify antirepublican suspects in Paris.17 Barlow felt protected by his French citizenship, and his subsequent role in Francisco de Miranda’s treason trial strengthened his conviction that his republicanism would defend him against the growing xenophobia.
Miranda had risen rapidly to the rank of general, but he had proven singularly inept in the field, twice ordering retreats that resulted in major French defeats. Before defecting to the Austrians, Dumouriez had ordered Miranda prosecuted for incompetence, cowardice, and treason. Miranda’s trial took place in April prior to the launching of the Terror. Being found guilty on any of these charges would have led to his execution. Instead, he was acquitted by the new revolutionary tribunal at Paris. Ignoring the influence Dumouriez’s disgrace had on the outcome, he credited Barlow with being one of his more effective defenders.
Barlow’s defense stressed Miranda’s renown as a republican revolutionary, claiming he had become widely known in the United States after the war. In addition, Barlow’s republican friends in Britain had spoken approvingly of him. Barlow focused exclusively on Miranda’s ideological credentials. He even invoked Washington and Franklin, assuring the tribunal that if they were present, they would give the same testimony about Miranda as they were getting from Barlow.18 Thomas Paine joined Barlow in defending Miranda, but because he could not speak fluent French, his testimony failed to have the same influence. By focusing narrowly on Miranda’s ideological credentials, Barlow seemed to extricate himself from the maelstrom into which French politics was descending.
Miranda’s acquittal occurred after Barlow had reassured Ruth that “there is no apprehension of personal danger to any peaceable person here.” Gouverneur Morris felt anyone who spoke against the revolution risked being lynched. Without a document issued by one’s section committee certifying one’s republicanism, a foreigner could not pass the customs barriers demarcating the city of Paris from its suburbs. Barlow put a deceptively positive gloss on events. Though the outcome of the struggle between the Montagnards and Girondins remained uncertain until the beginning of June, he must have been aware of the effect Dumouriez’s treason and the turmoil in the provinces were having on the politics and economy of France. Under the continuing threat of foreign invasion and increasing economic shortages, the sansculottes emerged as the engine of radical revolution. On May 4 the National Convention attempted to control the price of provisions in the metropolis with the Maximum. This first step toward a command economy simply exacerbated the spring shortages, lending further support to Ruth’s trepidations about joining him in France.19
Barlow’s strongest card turned out to be the increasing repression of their friends in Britain. Paine’s conviction in absentia for seditious libel in mid-December 1792 initiated a wave of judicial prosecutions. Frost, who had accompanied Barlow in presenting the Society for Constitutional Information’s address to the National Convention, was tried upon his return to England. He was convicted, sentenced to six months in Newgate, and was barred from acting as an attorney. The loyalist Associations enhanced the effect of official prosecution with boycotts. Having to watch helplessly as many of their friends were harassed and prosecuted lent compelling force to Wollstonecraft’s repeated entreaties that Ruth join her.
Though critical of what she considered Barlow’s manipulative style, Wollstonecraft had her own agenda in summoning Ruth, of which Ruth had little inkling. Wollstonecraft was rapidly losing all capacity for self-restraint in her relationship with Gilbert Imlay. She may have sensed that her best chance of avoiding complete surrender lay in having someone like Ruth as a companion. Once she realized that the Barlows were not about to sail for America, she barraged Ruth with letters urging her to cross the channel. Ruth left London in June, presumably escorted either by Hichborn or Leavenworth. The surviving evidence fails to tell us exactly when she finally joined Barlow, but it was too late to rescue Wollstonecraft from her infatuation with Imlay.20
We know virtually nothing about Barlow’s activities in Paris during the remainder of 1793 beyond occasional references to him in the correspondence of the expatriate Americans resident there. The most revealing of these is a letter James Swan wrote to Secretary of War Henry Knox at the end of 1793 after the National Convention had requested Gouverneur Morris’s recall. Swan then described Barlow as someone “who in the highest degree has the esteem of all” and for that reason “possesses every quality that could render an agent useful to the United States at this Republic.”21 Swan’s claim is backed up by the two likenesses of Barlow done by French artists at this time.22 But Swan offered no explanation of how Barlow had managed to win favor after the Terror had commenced in earnest and the xenophobic fear of foreigners had risen to the point where being an alien was as dangerous as being politically significant.
Joel Barlow (1793), by Louis C. Ruotte. In dress, hair styling, and pose, Barlow is represented as looking like any other republican zealot during the radical phase of the French Revolution. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
The most plausible explanation is that Barlow’s growing prominence as a republican ideologue, though one detached from the more mundane issues of the moment, enhanced his stature. As early as May he had assured Ruth, “I meddle with no politics.”23 But during the last half of 1793, Barlow supplanted Thomas Paine as the leading republican author writing in English. After squandering most of his political capital in the controversy over sparing the life of Louis XVI, Paine turned to religion. The change in focus would flower into a deistic tract entitled The Age of Reason, part one of which appeared in 1794. Barlow still had political ideas he wanted to develop; in addition to two works published in the autumn of 1793, he wrote a revealing unpublished memo.
The first published work was a new edition of Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus. In the preface Barlow claimed it was the fifth edition, though in fact it was the fourth. Why did Barlow go to the trouble of producing another version of a poem that very few people in France would read? An “Advertisement” dated July 12, 1793, stated that Barlow was offering a new version of the epic “for the sake of preserving the numerous corrections” which he had been making.24 Tumultuous times placed one’s papers at risk, but a couple of handwritten copies could have been equally effective if stored in a safe place Though Barlow had already deleted the dedication and more flattering references to Louis XVI from the London edition that had appeared six years earlier, after the king’s execution he needed to deprive Louis XVI of all agency in the success of the American Revolution to protect himself against anyone using previous versions of The Vision to impugn his republicanism. In place of Louis XVI making an enlightened decision to nourish liberty in the western world, the 1793 edition pictures him as duped into committing France to the struggle by “Gallic sages” (VI, 29) who employed “honest guile the royal ear to bend, / And lure him on fair freedom to defend” (VI, 39–40), Barlow included The Conspiracy of Kings in the Paris edition of The Vision to underline his antimonarchical identity. Such a precaution seemed prudent as heads began to roll.
The Paris edition of The Vision of Columbus was notable in several other respects. As a reflection of Barlow’s growing cosmopolitanism, France now shared credit for the success of the American Revolution with Spain, Holland, and even Russia because of Catherine the Great’s sponsorship of armed neutrality. Barlow also acted upon the recommendation of James Stanier Clarke and William Hayley to shorten his poem.25 All but one of the new edition’s books was reduced in size, but because Barlow expanded his treatment of France’s involvement in the American Revolution, the Paris edition shrank by only 406 lines (to 4,776), which the addition of twenty-seven notes largely offset. Many of these changes would later be incorporated into The Columbiad (1807).
Barlow’s other publication that autumn was Part II of his Advice to the Privileged Orders. In the preface Barlow claimed that he had drafted the text prior to his departure from Britain in November 1792. That is probably only half the truth. Part II went well beyond the theme of Part I—that the collapse of the old order was both desirable and inevitable—to advocate a universalistic program for the regeneration of mankind through fiscal reform of the European states. This was the kind of proposal one was more likely to hear in the Palais Royal than in London’s coffee houses. The basic structure of Barlow’s argument may have been sketched out in Britain during 1792, but its utopian claims, together with some references to contemporary events, suggest that Barlow added portions to his earlier work at least through the late summer.
In his introduction to Part II of the Advice, Barlow claimed that Joseph Johnson had abandoned printing it in response to “the violent attacks on the Liberty of the Press . . . which took place about that time” (214).26 One doesn’t have to read very far to see why Johnson hesitated. The first page posited “a perpetual warfare” between governors and governed and declared “the real occupation of the governors is either to plunder or to steal, as will best answer their purpose” (215). Barlow distinguished between governments “which are called despotic, [and] deal more in open plunder” and those “that call themselves free and act under the cloak of what they teach the people to reverence as a constitution.” The British government came properly under the latter rubric because it had “succeeded better by theft than the others have by plunder” (216). That was because her “people are more industrious, and create property faster; [and] because they are not sensible in what manner and in what quantities it is taken from them” (217). While Paine had argued the same point, he focused his critique on Britain while Barlow’s generalities applied equally to all Europe’s monarchies, whose extortions depended on foreign wars.
Barlow argued that Europe’s revenue systems were intentionally enveloped in obscurity and would continue that way as long as “society remains divided into two parties” (240). The governing few would always seek to deceive the many because otherwise the many would consider “defrauding the revenue . . . not only as justice to themselves, but as a duty to their children” (241). Barlow argued that hidden taxes imposed on consumption provided the best means of perpetuating the fraud, noting that six-tenths of Britain’s revenues and two-thirds of the revenue of ancien régime France had been raised this way. He maintained that such covert oppression would not be necessary if society were organized so that “there will be no aid or duty that the general interest can require from individuals, but what every individual will understand.” Then voluntary compliance could be relied upon because each individual would have “a greater personal interest in the performance than he would in the violation” (246–47).
Paine was more interested in redistribution than regeneration.27 But his distinction between “state” and “society” helped Barlow envision a stateless society that would function like a company of merchants where “every partner . . . expects advantage from the enterprise” once agreed to (248). Barlow gave this idea an additional utopian spin: “If the state consisted of nothing more than one great society composed of all the people, if the government was their will, and its object their happiness, the reasons for secrecy would cease, the intestine war [between governors and governed] would cease,” and “an open generosity of conduct” might prevail (251–52). Only “the improvident temper of one class of men, and the unreasonable selfishness of others” stood in the way of regenerating the social order (260). Barlow attributed the improvidence of urban workers “in a great measure . . . to the government” (261), but he did not pin responsibility for changing the situation exclusively on rulers. Instead, he argued that the oppressor and oppressed were each other’s victims and that it was the duty of the “middle classes. . . . to bring the men, who now fill the two extremes . . . to a proper view of their new station of citizens” (263–64).
Barlow’s utopian proclivities had a distinctively Christian cast. Salvation was available to everyone because those crushed “under the weight of privilege and pride, or of misery and despair” were not beyond the reach of reason. They could be “brought back by degrees to be useful members of the state; [so that] there would soon be no individual, but would find himself happier for the change” (264). Barlow disposed of the problem of human selfishness with a secular version of grace. Current opinions had “been formed under the disguise of impressions which do not belong to its [the heart’s] nature” (267). Past governments required the support of “imposition” because they had been established through violence (270). After bodily strength ceased to be relevant to war, other “fallacious signs of merit” had been attached to individuals to awe the common people. The two most common were “hereditary titles of honour” and “excessive attachment to property” (271). Barlow was confident “these things will be changed” (274) because “the universal habit with respect to” honor and property “has arisen out of unnatural and degrading systems of government” (275). “Establish government universally on the individual wishes and collected wisdom of the people, and it will give a spring to the moral faculties of every human creature, because every human creature must find an interest in its welfare” (276).
Barlow dismissed objections that his expectations were unrealistic by pointing to the example of France. Five years earlier no nation had been more obsessed with rank and wealth, but now both were of no account. Barlow was confident that the “same effect will be produced in other countries, by placing the government on the solid basis of reason, instead of propping it up on the tottering foot-stool of imposition” (281). Of course, he could not deny his argument was speculative and that many of his claims would have to wait upon experience for confirmation. But he was more interested in exploring “the effects that a general revolution will produce on the affairs of nations” than in precise predictions. He sought to alert people to “the corresponding change that will necessarily be wrought on the character of man; in order that, being prepared for the event, [one] may think of such arrangements as shall be likely to prevent [one’s] relapsing into the errors that have caused so much misery” (286–87).
Barlow objected to funding systems because they “converted commerce,” which naturally persuaded separate peoples of their mutual dependency and shared interests, “into a weapon of war” (289). Barlow admitted funding systems enhanced the ability of governments to pursue their political and military ambitions, but enabling “governments to hire men to slaughter each other with more than their own swords” was hardly meritorious, especially when “they wring out of the hard earnings of future generations the means of destroying the present” (294–95). Barlow argued that wars over commerce had replaced “religious enthusiasm” (298) in hurrying men to their destruction because high taxes rendered part of the population so “wretched” that “they are glad to engage as soldiers,” while those who stood to make a profit from war could silence the rest of the community with the illusion that the losses involved could be paid for later (299). Thus commerce became perverted into an engine of destruction. So long as trade between different peoples was beneficial to both, no two nations were natural enemies. Only governments possessed of funding systems could “offer us more money for destroying our neighbours than we can get by . . . business” (302), and through “fatal deception” (303) make “enemies of our best friends” (302).
Arguments such as these did nothing to enhance Barlow’s reputation among America’s Federalists. Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal policy depended on an impost supplemented by an excise. The latter, in the form of a whiskey tax, would set off a tax rebellion in western Pennsylvania, which the Washington administration repressed with overwhelming force to convince the British government that it was master in its own house. The impost had a more fortunate career. As the expanding European war made the United States the world’s principal neutral carrier, the revenues it raised transformed the nation’s war debt into a valuable asset, while the burden of funding that debt was scarcely felt. That would undercut Barlow’s claim that mankind would be better off if states foreswore public credit entirely. He did not deny either the existence or legitimacy of defensive wars that incurred debts, but he remained confident there were other ways to dispose of them that were more consistent with justice and equal rights. A footnote he had supplied for the London edition of John Trumbull’s M’Fingal celebrated the role the depreciating continental currency had played in equalizing the burdens of America’s Revolutionary War.28
Whether one approved of Hamilton’s program or objected to it, no one in the United States wanted to go back to the economic difficulties that had afflicted the nation between 1784 and 1788. However, Barlow’s critique of European public finance reinforced Republican ideological reservations about the route the nation had taken to consolidate the American Revolution. When Part II of Barlow’s Advice appeared in the United States during 1796, it contributed to the widening gulf between the Federalists and the Republican followers of Jefferson and Madison.
Sometime during 1793 Barlow wrote a memo entitled “On the prospect of a war with England” that addressed the question of which European powers were the natural friends or enemies of the United States.29 Since the memo opens with a reference to “the present coalition against France” and treats Britain as the leader of that coalition, the earliest it could have been written is the spring of 1793. The subsequent statement that “experience proves that a safe & honorable neutrality on the part of America can no longer exist” (1) probably references two British orders-in-council. The first dated June 8, 1793, authorized bringing American merchantmen bound for France into British ports, where their cargoes were to be sold to English buyers. The other, on November 6, permitted the seizure of any American vessel trading with the French West Indies. These actions led to a heated reaction in the United States that threatened to embroil the nation in another war. Washington only succeeded in heading off belligerent pressures in Congress by sending John Jay to negotiate with the British government in 1794. It seems likely that Barlow wrote his memo in the autumn of 1793 before learning of further depredations by the Barbary states against American shipping, which are not mentioned.
The other development dating the memo is a French controversy between the free traders—the position of the Girondins—and the mercantilists.30 In theory, both French camps favored free trade, but the mercantilists wanted to use commerce as a weapon against Britain and to enlist the United States in that enterprise. Barlow’s recommendation that all articles of “British manufacture” be banned from the United States (1) and that all debts due Britain and her subjects be “held as an indemnity for unjust captures made by the British on American property” (2) aligned him squarely with the mercantilists. He calculated the outstanding debt of America to Britons to be £3 million sterling. If the United States withheld that sum, “the stoppage” would “take out of circulation at least forty times the amount” and “overset” the English funds, whose credit was already shaky. In that eventuality, he expected “a revolution in the government would take place, and peace would be the consequence” (2). The memo also proposed a general embargo on all imports and exports similar to the one Jefferson and his followers would institute in 1807. Barlow acknowledged it would severely affect America’s agricultural interests but argued that the harm would only be temporary and that the measure could provide a great spur to manufacturing and privateering.
In contrast to Barlow’s later hostility to warfare in any form, in this memo he suggested that government insure privateers “for a moderate premium” so that “the successful enterprises would pay for the unsuccessful ones” (2–3). Under his plan he estimated that the government could have five hundred armed vessels fitted out within four months. “These privateers, aided by 12 or 15 French frigates, might ruin the trade of England, Holland, & Spain & Portugal, to the west Indies & to South America, in a very short time.” Since Americans were especially skilled in naval affairs, their force of privateers “would be equal to four times that force sent against them” owing to “the immense coast not having any port open” (3) to the British. Finally, though the nation had no interest in possessing either “Canada or Nova Scotia,” Barlow speculated that “both might be taken in a short campaigne” (3–4).
These ideas became the staples of Republican thinkers in the United States during the next twenty years. They assumed Britain was the nation’s principal enemy and France its natural friend because Britain obstructed the free commerce of the rest of the world. Barlow also saw Britain as ripe for a revolution, which he was more than ready to have the United States help precipitate. France as a republic was by definition stable and peaceful because its government rested on the consent of the people. Barlow was not dissuaded by the spectacle of civil war and the Terror because France was being attacked by most of Europe’s monarchies. The only obstacle to internal and external peace was the natural antagonism monarchies bore to each other and republics. Order would be restored soon enough after the enemies of the revolution had been brought under control and no longer threatened the Republic.
The Terror only began in earnest after the Convention voted on October 10, 1793, to set aside the new constitution and institute revolutionary government until there was peace. That decision paved the way for Marie Antoinette’s execution on October 16.31 Two weeks later Brissot de Warville and twenty-one of his associates followed her to the guillotine. Barlow later gave a detailed description of Brissot’s execution in an introduction he supplied for the second volume of the 1794 London edition of New Travels. Brissot said nothing on the scaffold, though he looked steadfastly at the other condemned deputies before he “submitted his head” to the “engine of death.” Despite the detailed nature of his account, Barlow probably had not witnessed the event. Had he been present, one suspects he would have experienced difficulty in writing so dispassionately about it. Wollstonecraft narrowly escaped getting into serious trouble when she exploded in anger after stumbling into the bloody aftermath of some executions about this time.32
Though Barlow accepted the death of his former friends as collateral damage, no one felt safe as the Terror gained momentum. English subjects were especially exposed after the National Convention ordered their wholesale arrest in early October. The Barlows found especially disturbing the detention of John Hurford Stone—who had established an English language press in Paris that published the latest version of The Vision of Columbus—and his wife, Rachel Coope. Stone was a London coal merchant who had been part of Richard Price’s congregation. Like many English radicals at the time, the Stones were drawn to France by the revolution and settled there in February 1793. In the early autumn, Coope had temporarily moved in with Ruth, who in turn was living with Mrs. Blackden. The Terror led women to congregate while the men moved around because it was assumed that “a family of women” would be in less danger than the men.33 Though the arrest of Helen Maria Williams with her sister and mother on October 9 shattered that illusion, Barlow briefly found it easier to conclude that theirs was a special case than to face up to the growing danger affecting everyone.
The executions of Olympe de Gouges and Madame Roland in early November demonstrated one didn’t have to be a murderer like Charlotte Corday, or a deposed queen, to be guillotined. English subjects ran a greater risk than Americans, but the execution of Brissot and his followers on October 31 made the close ties that had developed between the Girondins and people like Barlow and Paine seem like a liability. The arrest of Thomas Griffith on October 17 revealed that the French had difficulty distinguishing between Americans and Englishmen. Barlow signed a petition for Griffith’s release, but initially it only succeeded in transferring him to a less crowded prison.34 This may explain why, on November 23, Barlow and Mark Leavenworth proposed to the Committee of Public Safety a variation of the original Girondin plan to acquire Louisiana for France.35 Their proposal differed from its previous incarnations by offering to undertake the operation entirely at the proposers’ expense. All they asked in return was the movable property of the Spanish Crown.
Had their proposal been accepted and the scheme succeeded, Barlow and Leavenworth might have been known in history for perpetrating a grand, strategic error. The last thing the United States needed was for a powerful European nation to secure a foothold in Louisiana. It would be a mistake, however, to describe their proposal as a plot against the United States, even though some in France like G. J. A. Ducher used such terms.36 Barlow continued to view France’s expansion into Latin America as consistent with the security of the United States because Britain, currently in alliance with Spain, was suspected of wanting to take over her Latin American empire. Reviving a Girondin proposal after the execution of the party’s principal leaders suggests that Barlow and Leavenworth wished to signal their willingness to cooperate with anyone promoting interests they thought the two republics shared.
A month later, on December 20, Barlow and Leavenworth joined James Swan and Colonel Blackden in presenting an address to the assembly of the Réunion section of Paris that again affirmed the unity of interests between the two republics.37 Réunion was one of the more radical of the forty-eight sections into which Paris had been divided in 1790. At the end of 1792 it had assumed this name as an expression of solidarity with the perpetrators of the September massacres. A year later the section adopted a patriotic address “to their United States brothers,” to which the four Americans now replied. They implicitly endorsed the Terror when they declared that those “who had sprinkled the tree of liberty, which they had planted in America, with their blood” knew that the blessings of liberty could not be bought at too dear a price. “It was necessary for us, as for you, to endure the horrors of war; we too have seen our houses burned, our wandering families reduced to poverty, our fathers and mothers, our children and our friends have also been slaughtered to break our fetters.” Now the United States was free. France likewise had succeeded in overthrowing tyranny and defeating conspiracies motivated by fanaticism and cupidity. The only task that remained for the French people was to frame a republican constitution. Once that was accomplished, the two nations would be bound in a perpetual alliance based on virtue against a coalition of tyrants dependent on crime and avarice.
When read to the section assembly, the Americans’ address met with “resounding applause,” and the meeting ordered five hundred impressions printed for circulation among the other sections of the city and the popular societies. This publication insured that its signers received the favorable publicity that was increasingly useful to residents of Paris now that the Law of the Suspects (September 17) officially subjected everyone’s ideological identity to the scrutiny of the section committees.38 How much foreigners remained in danger was dramatized on December 28, when Thomas Paine, Barlow’s close friend and ideological associate, was arrested, along with the Prussian, Anacharsis Cloots, on an order of the Committee of General Surety and Surveillance.
Paine and Cloots proved to be more vulnerable than Barlow because, in addition to being French citizens, they were members of the National Convention. After his Girondin associates were driven from the convention in June, Paine had stayed clear of the body, though he cooperated with the foreign ministry’s efforts to arrange closer relations between France and the United States. The man on the Committee of Public Safety most responsible for foreign affairs, Bertrand Barère, credited Paine with making commercial arrangements during the autumn of 1793 that would lead to significant shipments of American food the following spring during the period of acute shortages. Paine had been denounced when the National Convention voted to place the expelled Girondins on trial but then was ignored until December 25, when Robespierre demanded that the National Convention purge itself of foreigners. The convention responded by revoking Paine’s and Cloots’s immunity from arrest.
At the time, Paine’s Part I of The Age of Reason, was being set into print by Stone’s press near the Hôtel Grande Bretagne, in which Barlow had taken up temporary residence. Paine had asked Barlow to pick up the proof sheets from the printer as they became available, and Barlow had retrieved the first signature for Paine to correct. On the night of his arrest, Paine was at White’s Hotel rather than his residence at St. Denis. Upon being asked for his papers, Paine claimed Barlow had them. When a sleepy Barlow pleaded ignorance as to their whereabouts, the commissioners repaired to Paine’s residence outside the city walls, accompanied by Barlow.
Paine’s arrest took place during the period of extreme de-Christianization. In this context, nothing in Part I of The Age of Reason struck the police examiners as particularly incriminating, and Paine was allowed to hand Barlow the remainder of the manuscript before being carried off to the Luxembourg Prison. Barlow subsequently helped see the rest of Part I through the press. Five editions of the tract would appear in Paris during 1794, but Barlow did not attempt to translate the work into French. Instead, he concentrated on trying to get Paine out of the Luxembourg because by then the Terror had progressed to the point where the prison had become a holding pen for those awaiting execution.
Barlow helped draft an appeal to the National Convention for Paine’s release, to which eighteen Americans in Paris subscribed their names. More than half the petitioners were merchants and captains who had recently come to Paris to free their property from commercial restrictions in the out ports. Neither Swan nor Blackden joined Leavenworth and Barlow in having their names affixed to this petition. On January 20, 1794, the National Convention granted them an audience to present their plea. They emphasized the role Paine had played in securing America’s independence and expressed the hope “that you will not keep longer in the bonds of painful captivity, the man whose courageous and energetic pen did so much to free the Americans and whose intentions . . . were to render the same services to the French Republic.” After giving them a frosty reception, the Convention referred the petitioners to the Committee of Public Surety. It would not get around to considering their petition until the beginning of March, sometime after the authorities cut off the visits Barlow had been making to Paine every few days. By then, Gouverneur Morris’s inaction made it almost certain that the committee would dismiss the petition.39
Morris still officially represented the U.S. government, though he had retired to Seine-Porte, twenty miles outside the city, making only occasional visits to the capital. He responded lethargically to Paine’s appeals for help. Even after Morris realized he risked being held responsible for Paine’s death, he still did little. Paine remained incarcerated until James Monroe, Morris’s replacement, secured his release in November 1794. By then Paine was so sick that it took him more than a year to recover. Since Morris had no more regard for Barlow than Paine, Barlow must have counted his failure to be elected to the National Convention as good fortune.
Everyone living in Paris during the spring of 1794 would be marked by the Terror, but not everyone bowed to its escalating violence. Henri Grégoire managed to defend his religious faith in the face of the powerful pressures brought against him during the height of the de-Christianization campaign. Unlike four bishops who renounced their ordinations, Grégoire refused to abandon his religious functions. Pleading freedom of conscience, he denied the National Convention jurisdiction over the matter. Though taunted in public and threatened in private, he remained firm. Grégoire had been appointed to the Committee of Public Instruction, where he busied himself reforming the educational system and refining France’s cultural standards. In the areas of linguistics, iconography, and educational reform, Grégoire’s high republican idealism could express itself with less danger of incurring the wrath of the Montagnards. Eventually, his reports about the dangers of cultural “vandalism” contributed to ending the Terror.40
Barlow pursued a less courageous strategy, but even it drained his creative energies. After doing all he felt he could do for Paine, Barlow announced to Abraham Baldwin that he was abandoning his literary endeavors.41 Since the war precluded a safe passage home during the spring of 1794 and moving to England was not an option, Barlow refashioned himself into a man of business in Germany. This was quite a shift for someone who had made his name as an author and an ideologue, but Barlow could not afford to be idle, and the intensification of the Terror left no alternative.