12 Franco-American Crisis

Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World

CHAPTER TWELVE

Franco-American Crisis

The voyage from Algiers to Marseilles was one of Barlow’s few happy experiences under sail. Aside from a brief bout of sickness on the first day out, he arrived, after a leisurely twelve-day passage, on July 30, 1797. It undoubtedly helped to be traveling on his own vessel, the Rachel, with his own captain, Philip Sloan. Even the forty-day quarantine in the Marseilles lazaretto failed to dampen his spirits, as he was reentering a world where he felt much more at home. A letter from Ruth awaited him there. Written on June 26, it reminded him that now the distance between them had narrowed, their exchanges should take about two weeks rather than two months. Though it was agonizing to be so close and yet so far away, he considered his circumstances vastly improved. As his spirits lifted, he ruminated on the word Marseilles, whose combination of vowels and consonants struck him as having peculiar beauty.¹

The forty-day quarantine gave him time to catch up on his business and tend to some of the loose ends remaining from his mission. Fifty thousand dollars in tribute money was due in Tunis in two months, along with $10,000 in presents. His first letter on August 1, to Stephen Cathalan, addressed the Tunisian problem. Cathalan was to inquire whether anyone in Marseilles would exchange bills on Tunis for bills on Philadelphia. Barlow wanted to bypass the Bacris, who he thought were unduly profiting from serving as bankers to the United States. But there was no way around them in handling the nation’s business in Algiers, and Barlow remained mindful that the United States was still deeply indebted to their house. Getting money into the Mediterranean continued to be a major problem, and Barlow urged David Humphreys to solicit Lisbon and London merchants for credits in Leghorn in exchange for drafts on Philadelphia.²

Barlow also wrote a final report about his mission for Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. He was reasonably satisfied with everything but the Tunisian negotiation. In retrospect, he felt the United States should have dealt directly with the bey instead of relying on Hasan Pasha to bring Tunis to terms. Barlow suspected Algeria and Tunis of coming to an understanding behind his back, possibly through the agency of Joseph Famin, whose loyalties Barlow now questioned. Barlow couldn’t help contrasting the frankness of Allois D’Herculais with Famin’s deviousness. He suspected Famin had aspired to dominate U.S. trade with the Levant but that the French government had pressured him into sabotaging American interests there instead. Barlow suggested a strategy for getting rid of Famin. If American consuls were forbidden to engage in trade, he expected Famin would resign.³

Barlow assumed that Britain and Spain felt the same way about American commerce in the Mediterranean as did France, requiring good men on the Barbary Coast to protect the nation’s interests. He took a generally dim view of the North African states and was especially critical of the tyranny Hasan Pasha, supported by the Bacris, exercised over Algeria. He thought, however, the United States had no choice but to work with the dey until he was overthrown. The minute that happened, he predicted, the Bacris would become irrelevant.

Barlow did not neglect his own affairs. One matter of special concern was the settlement of his official accounts. Barlow remained nervous about the initiatives he had taken without explicit authorization, especially since he had gone to Algiers without a compensation agreement. An initial letter to Humphreys suggested he be paid $200 per month for twenty-five months, plus expenses. If that was unacceptable he would make a present of his services—though presumably not of his expenses—to the government.⁴ Judging from the way he subsequently pursued the matter, the suggestion that he receive nothing for his services was either a lame gesture of gentility or a misconceived defense against being accused of extravagance. Other uncertainties remained, like the guarantee he had given the Bacris of their cargo in the Fortune being immune to capture by the British. Because Hasan Pasha had insisted, Barlow believed he had to make that promise to free himself from the tyrant’s clutches.

The administration liberally compensated Barlow for his efforts. He requested $5,974.52 and asked Humphreys to provide him with a credit for that amount in Europe. Humphreys had anticipated Barlow’s needs by sending him an authorization to draw on Baring Brothers in London for $5,000. Left almost $1,000 short, Barlow wrote several letters to Rufus King, the new U.S. minister to Britain, as well as to Humphreys in an attempt to collect the difference. Humphreys eventually authorized Baring Brothers to pay Barlow’s additional requisition, but getting the message from Lisbon to London and the money to Paris took time. Transferring funds from Britain to France during wartime required Baring Brothers to send £1,125 in sterling bills to the U.S. consul in Hamburg, Samuel Williams, who then bought livre bills on Paris. Williams purchased three such bills, which came close to making up the full amount, and for the small remainder drew on Robert Lyle in Barlow’s favor. Lyle, a native of New Jersey, had been Barlow’s partner in an earlier Hamburg-based venture whose modest profits Lyle had received while Barlow was in Algiers. The larger bills were all paid by the end of December, and Barlow was confidant Lyle would pay his when it came due.⁵

The money became available to Barlow just as he began notifying those indebted to him that he required prompt payment. Turning British sterling into good bills on Paris turned out to be a lot simpler than getting good bills from his commercial ventures in the Mediterranean. He had instructed Cathalan to forward seven livre bills for payment in Paris, hoping the proceeds would relieve his immediate needs there. Only three were accepted and paid. Two came back protested, while the other two encountered difficulties, though payment was eventually “arranged.” The ones that were refused had been endorsed by reputable people in Marseilles, so Barlow was reasonably sure that he would eventually be compensated, but the difficulties he encountered in transferring money within France constituted a rude reminder that many of the economic problems that the revolution had created had yet to be solved.

The Directory’s “hard money” loan of December 10, 1795, had been largely subscribed in assignats that were overvalued at 100:1. To raise needed funds the government had no choice but continued reliance on currency finance. In March of 1796, new instruments known as “mandats territoriaux” backed by national properties first made their appearance. Barlow later complained to David Humphreys that his mission had cost him $20,000 in personal losses. The protest did not ring true because he had boasted to Ruth of the small fortune he had made in the Mediterranean trade and his inscriptions had risen to the point where, in Ruth’s opinion, they constituted “a pretty fortune.”⁶ The losses Barlow complained about to Humphries involved the mandats, which—though depreciating from the moment they made their appearance—briefly acquired value for those who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

During the three months between April and July, while they were overvalued at 30:1 in relation to the depreciating assignat, the mandats were exchangeable for national properties valued in assignats at an artificially low rate. The arrangement set off a scramble for national properties resembling the earlier one in May 1795, while further corroding the value of the mandats.⁷ Ruth, who showed good common sense when it came to financial matters, may have followed Daniel Parker’s advice and instructed Jacques Récamier to invest any discretionary income in additional national properties.⁸ Barlow’s sense that he had lost heavily through his mission derived more from having missed a second chance to acquire major assets at fire-sale prices. After July 17, 1796, the depreciated mandats ceased to be legal tender, though they could still be exchanged for national properties at their hard money value. Even at 1 percent of face value, purchasing with them remained advantageous because of diminished demand for real estate. Parker would cap his extensive real estate acquisitions by purchasing Madame de Pompadour’s former estate, the Château de Crécy, at auction in 1797.⁹

Barlow did have some reason to feel he had been left behind, though, because going on a “hard currency” standard failed to increase the money supply, despite the booty France’s armies collected from their conquests. The difficulties Barlow experienced in getting his French bills paid reflected the shortage of hard money, but it did not prevent him from initiating several new commercial ventures while in the lazaretto. He ordered the captain of the Friendship to find a freight for America in the Mediterranean. If he succeeded in doing so, Barlow instructed him to hug the African coast after passing the Straits of Gibraltar to avoid French privateers, who were lying off the Spanish coast. If a freight could not be found for the Friendship, she was to come to Marseilles, where Barlow proposed to equip the vessel with a protection against French privateers. Barlow needed to document that the crew was predominantly American and the vessel American owned to insure its neutrality would be respected. The Friendship had already had one brush with French cruisers that had only ended happily because of papers Captain Sampson had procured in Leghorn.¹⁰ But Barlow feared that another French cruiser might consider the Friendship’s American crew British subjects unless they possessed proof of their nationality. He had experienced enough anguish in wresting his fellow countrymen from the clutches of the Barbary potentates to want to avoid going through a similar process with the French.

Freights from the Mediterranean turned out to be hard to find; however, Barlow remained confident that he could sell both vessels if no freights materialized. In the meantime, he could enhance the value of the vessels by getting the Marine Ministry in Paris to issue them protections. He eventually secured a protection for the Rachel, but the increasing chill in Franco-American relations during the autumn of 1797 led him to hedge his bets with the Friendship. Her protection failed to specify that two-thirds of the crew were American, suggesting that Barlow was content to have her treated as a French vessel. Such a protection would be useful to a French purchaser, to whom Barlow eventually instructed Cathalan to sell the Friendship.¹¹

Barlow remained in Marseilles no longer than absolutely necessary. When his quarantine ended on September 10, he and Cathalan set out immediately for nearby Aix, where they filed protests before a provincial tribunal for American vessels that had fallen prey to French privateers.¹² After disposing of this last bit of consular business, Barlow made for Paris and Ruth as fast as he could, arriving in the capital in the wake of the coup of Eighteen Fructidor.

On the night of September 4, 1797, a majority of the executive Directory, with the assistance of an army contingent, arrested and deported fifty-three allegedly royalist lawmakers who had opposed their policies. Two directors who objected to the purge were also arrested, though one of these subsequently escaped to Italy. The remaining three directors then had the legislature provide them with two more congenial colleagues. The action sent a strong message about the likely fate of anyone who opposed the reconstituted executive. Barlow failed to comment on how these developments conformed to his republican expectations, but he probably accepted the idea that the coup had been necessary to defend the Republic against a monarchical restoration. Because it had been bloodless, public order in Paris was undisturbed, and the citizenry indifferent if not apathetic. His reunion with Ruth, together with the public amusements and private amenities of the city, temporarily crowded out politics.

Ruth had recently befriended an American boarding at her pension and was eager for Barlow to meet him. Though ten or more years their junior, Robert Fulton had been in Europe longer than they had. Born near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to a family without means, Fulton had been apprenticed to a silversmith. Having little taste either for his master or the craft, he had turned to painting portraits in his spare time and was soon able to buy back his indenture. Eventually, he assembled enough resources—with assistance from his patrons—to study painting with the American-born Benjamin West in London. Like Barlow, Fulton refused to confine himself to one occupation. Just as he was establishing his reputation as a painter, he turned to civil engineering. Rather than representing the world as it was, he—like Barlow—wanted to change it into something better. He proposed a comprehensive system of small canals for Britain, and his A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (1796) argued that such a network could connect all the major population centers of the kingdom. Fulton came to France in 1797 to patent this canal scheme before returning to America, only to become bogged down in the French bureaucracy.

Robert Fulton (1798), by John Vanderlyn. Done shortly after Barlow and Fulton had become acquainted, Vanderlyn captures an uncertainty in Fulton’s personality to which both Barlows responded sympathetically. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

Despite Barlow’s assistance, Fulton would not receive a fifteen-year patent until February 1798. Well before that, Fulton, Ruth, and Barlow moved out of the pension to live together. Thus began an unconventional ménage à trois that was to last off and on for the next seven years. Fuller’s recent biographers have noted the sexual possibilities in the living arrangement. However, the bonding that had taken place between Barlow and Ruth’s older siblings in New Haven during the late 1770s and early 1780s provides a better model for understanding the relationship that initially developed between the three. The Barlows sought the reconstitution of family intimacies that had been disrupted by distance and Dudley’s and Lucy’s recent deaths. Fulton’s youthfulness also qualified him to serve as a surrogate for the son they had never had. Fulton, for his part, appreciated the Barlows’ familiarity with France and the guidance and support they offered as he strove to realize the dreams all three shared for a future based on reason and technological innovation. Fulton looked upon the Barlows as older, wiser siblings substituting for absent parents.

Joel Barlow (1798), by John Vanderlyn. Vanderlyn’s charcoal and pencil portrayal of Barlow, done at roughly the same time as his sketch of Fulton, suggests why Fulton saw Barlow as an older brother or even a father figure. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joel Barlow.

During the autumn of 1797, Fulton addressed a monograph to the Directory, entitled “Thoughts on Free Trade with Reasons Why Foreign Possessions And all Duties on Importation is Injurious to Nations.” These were subjects very close to Barlow’s heart, and he may have helped Fulton in developing them, though Fulton’s economic critique of colonialism was clearly his own. Barlow probably also had a hand in a subsequent antiwar manifesto that Fulton published, entitled “To the Friends of Mankind,” and in Fulton’s “The Republican Creed.” Finally, a recent Fulton biographer credits Barlow with lighting “the submarine spark” in his new friend.¹³ Barlow quickly grasped the potential of underwater warfare for challenging Britain’s naval supremacy and advised Fulton about how to interest the French government in the development of a “Nautilus.”

Then, as now, submarines were expensive, and Fulton needed money up front, in addition to reasonable compensation for the time and effort he devoted to the project. Barlow helped Fulton draft a proposed agreement with the French Ministry of Marine that would secure him both. Barlow gave freely of his advice and energy because he saw Fulton as a younger version of himself and Britain’s naval power as the principal barrier to the emergence of a republican world order based on the freedom of commerce.

Barlow soon realized that the Paris he had returned to was very different from the city he had left. He quickly became disillusioned with France’s reconstituted Directory. Over the next fifteen months, disappointment would ripen into disgust with what he considered the corruption and incompetence of the national legislature. By January 1799, he thought that “nothing short of fructidorfying can bring them to common sense, not to say honesty.”¹⁴ But in October 1797, the French government’s shortcomings were principally evident in its deteriorating relations with the United States.

During Barlow’s absence in Algiers, the Washington administration had replaced Ambassador James Monroe with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. The Directory interpreted the substitution of an English-educated aristocrat for a known republican enthusiast as part of the betrayal of the Franco-American alliance evidenced in the Jay Treaty. It refused to receive Pinckney and subjected him to annoying surveillance before finally ordering him out of the country on pain of being treated as a common criminal. When President John Adams learned of Pinckney’s humiliation, he responded by appointing three commissioners to resolve the difficulties plaguing Franco-American relations. Each represented a different section of the country, and Adams insisted on reappointing Pinckney for the Deep South. John Marshall, the future chief justice of the United States, represented the mid-Atlantic, and Elbridge Gerry, from Massachusetts, New England. They arrived in the French capital shortly after Barlow’s return to Paris, though not before French cruisers, based in the West Indies, had begun seizing American merchant vessels.

The Directory refused to receive the commissioners, though Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the foreign minister, granted them an unofficial audience and issued them hospitality cards. Talleyrand advised them to be patient because the new post-Fructidor government had yet to consolidate its power. The envoys at first were hopeful because they had reason to think Talleyrand favored an accommodation with the United States. A clubfoot had forced this brilliant man, a minor noble by birth, to pursue a career in the church rather than the army. During the early days of the Revolution, Talleyrand was the only bishop in France to back the civil constitution of the clergy and had proposed the nationalization of Catholic Church properties to pay the monarchy’s debts. He was on a mission to England when the monarchy fell, and he chose to seek refuge in the United States rather than join the émigrés in Europe. During his two-year sojourn in America, he had ample opportunity to take the measure of the new nation’s leadership. Though Talleyrand had not much liked the New World, he possessed a better understanding of the United States than any high-ranking French official since Louis Duportail and Brissot de Warville.

Nonetheless, as time progressed, the American commissioners became suspicious that Talleyrand was stalling for a purpose. Their suspicions seemed confirmed when, after many weeks of inactivity, they were approached by several of Talleyrand’s agents. The commissioners then learned that the price of accommodation would be an apology for some critical statements Adams had made to Congress about France, a large loan, and a substantial bribe. By then all Paris knew that the Directory had declined to deal directly with the commissioners. Barlow later claimed he had no knowledge of the specific demands made by Talleyrand’s intermediaries, but it is clear from his correspondence that this was not the case. At the very least he had indirect access to Gerry, who let on “thorough secret whispers” to Americans like Fulwar Skipwith that the American commissioners were divided about how to deal with the Directory’s demands.¹⁵ Barlow also occasionally saw Talleyrand at social gatherings, which the commissioners made a point of shunning. While Talleyrand did not honor Barlow with an invitation to dinner, as he did John Trumbull, Trumbull painted a miniature of Barlow at this time, and the sittings would have provided an occasion for discussing the stalled negotiation.¹⁶

Joel Barlow (1798), attributed to John Trumbull. Trumbull’s stern, romantic representation of Barlow contrasts sharply with Vanderlyn’s more gentrified representation of Barlow from the same period. Photograph © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Barlow bided his time through the winter until he learned that Talleyrand had given up on Marshall and Pinckney and would only talk with Gerry. On March 4, 1798, fearing the worst, Barlow penned a long letter to his brother-in-law Abraham Baldwin about the deteriorating relations between the two republics.¹⁷ Barlow blamed President Adams more than the Jay Treaty for the failure of the commissioners to reach an understanding with France. That was not to say that the Jay Treaty hadn’t given offence, but Barlow believed that France would have been willing to forgive the injury but for the composition of the American peace commission. Americans underestimated the importance France attached to the character of the men representing a nation overseas. Jefferson had pleased them by his vigorous support of their revolution. His recall in 1789 had raised questions about the U.S. government’s intentions, especially after Gouverneur Morris—described by Barlow as a “wide-mouth bawler” who fraternized with royalists and counterrevolutionaries—was named Jefferson’s replacement. Pinckney had initially been dismissed because—in contrast to Monroe—he was seen as someone of Morris’s ilk. The rest of the commission was not much better. Marshall had violently defended the English treaty, while Gerry was regarded as “a little make-weight man,” not intended to have any influence. Gerry was known to be a republican, though, and Barlow was confident the Directory would have negotiated with him had Gerry “been sent alone, and not been shackled with the other two.”

Barlow claimed that Adams’s indiscreet words were resented in France almost as much as his insensitive appointments. Adams had spoken disparagingly of France as having “overturned religion” and being incapable of abiding by its treaties. Americans made a mistake in thinking that domestic utterances went unnoticed abroad. Published references made in the U.S. House of Representatives to the Directory being a “five-headed monster” did not have a soothing influence. The informed Frenchmen Barlow encountered in the cafés and salons of Paris also were aware of Adams’s criticisms of the French Revolution in his Discourses on Davilla (1790). These writings, along with his policies, led the French to conclude that Adams was a royalist.

Barlow thought American mismanagement was responsible for bringing the two republics “to the brink of war.” The remedy was to appoint ministers acceptable to the Directory. If Madison and Monroe replaced the former commissioners and Adams made a few friendly comments about France, all the difficulties between the two nations could be resolved in twenty-four hours. That assessment contrasted with Barlow’s anxiety about “seeing him [Adams] give another desperate leap into the region of madness” that would lead to war between two nations that ought to be friends. Barlow feared that Pinckney and Marshall would in their dispatches seek to inflame rather than calm the tensions between the two republics.

Having no idea of the furor his March 4 letter would eventually create, Barlow expressed his anger and frustration to Baldwin without restraint. He initially decided against sending similar communications to Jefferson and Madison, though eventually he dispatched a modified version of this letter to the vice president in case Congress adjourned before Baldwin received his.¹⁸ Barlow assumed both Baldwin and Jefferson would use his communication discretely. A Boston merchant, William Lee, carried the letters to America where, Oliver Wolcott Jr., acting for an insecure administration obsessed with the danger of foreign influence, managed to intercept and copy Barlow’s letter to Jefferson but not his letter to Baldwin.¹⁹

Lee had purchased the Friendship and the Rachel from Barlow in order to send them to Cadiz to load with cargoes of salt for America. Barlow, along with Robert Lyle, became equal partners with Lee in the cargo. Lee was to purchase a return cargo of provisions from the salt sales in the expectation that both vessels would return to Europe before the next harvest. The venture’s profitability required adherence to a tight schedule, and throughout the spring of 1798 Barlow urged Lee to speed the provisions to Europe so that they would arrive before domestic prices broke. Barlow was so optimistic about the venture’s prospects that he extended a personal loan to Lyle and endorsed some bills he had authorized Cathalan to draw on Lyle.²⁰ Barlow assumed all three partners would be rich once the two vessels returned to Europe. Unfortunately, the first leg of the Friendship and the Rachel’s voyage failed to turn a profit. Even if it had, Barlow had not foreseen how the worsening relationship between the United States and France would affect the fortunes of Americans trying to do business on the continent.

Despite commercial and diplomatic disappointments, Barlow claimed that this period was one of the happiest in his life.²¹ He and Ruth were enjoying a rare spate of good health, and the timely payment for his service in Algeria cushioned them from the hard times that affected other Americans living in France. That winter they started planning a spring visit to Switzerland. Barlow had seen enough of the Alps from a distance to be fascinated by mountains that had no parallel in New England. He was equally curious about Switzerland’s republicanism. But they kept postponing their journey—allegedly in response to political disturbances that accompanied Napoleon’s victorious campaigns against the Austrians—but really because no place had come to suit them both better than Paris.

The lure of Paris did not consist simply in its culture or in their newfound friend, Fulton. The Barlows had become prominent fixtures of the city’s expatriate community. Their social ascent had begun prior to Barlow’s departure for Algeria when Monroe brought them into his circle. Ruth subsequently reported that though she missed Barlow desperately—she complained of being unable to sleep without him—she was far from lonely. She disliked being trapped in a card-playing social round because it left no time for reading and serious conversation. However, she was dutiful in maintaining contact with their American and French friends. She reported often encountering Henri Grégoire and the translator of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, François Lanthenas, both of whom sent Barlow their regards. Helen Maria Williams, at whose table Ruth always found “good society,” replaced the Monroes after their recall, and Barlow’s success in Algiers further enhanced their social status after his return.²²

Barlow was convinced that if the world’s two largest republics failed to set an enlightened example, the redemptive potential of republicanism would be squandered. He supported Gerry’s efforts to prevent a rupture between the two countries after Pinckney and Marshall left Paris. Because Gerry would not learn of Barlow’s disparaging description of him until later, he accepted Barlow’s coaching while negotiating with the Directory. Barlow then relayed optimistic reports to the United States about the progress Gerry was making. Barlow and Fulton also advised George Logan during his unauthorized peace mission to France in the summer of 1798, introducing him to the Anglophone community in Paris. Barlow complained he lacked influence in France, but he exaggerated his powerlessness. Actually, he was shy about becoming entangled in French politics after coming so near to dying “with the fathers of the Republic [the Girondins] because they were my friends,” and he did not want to assume responsibility for the debacle he sensed was in the making.²³ He had fewer reservations about engaging in freelance diplomacy back home.

Pinckney and Marshall’s XYZ Dispatches describing the insults to which Talleyrand’s agents had subjected the commissioners ignited fierce hostility towards France. Enraged Americans responded to what they construed as an attempt to humiliate the nation by drafting a series of belligerent addresses to President Adams. The president’s formal, published answers fed the fires of public wrath. Inflamed public opinion induced the retirement of some in Congress, who had identified with the Republican opposition to Adams’s policies, leaving Federalist majorities in both houses of the legislature. The Federalists used their newfound power to pass a series of measures that pointed to war with France. Congress sanctioned the arming of American merchant ships to defend themselves against French cruisers. It enlarged the navy, creating for the first time a cabinet-level post of secretary of the navy, and authorized U.S. vessels to seize or destroy France’s public and private warships. Finally, Congress expanded the existing army and authorized the formation of a provisional force over which George Washington assumed titular command, though with the understanding that Alexander Hamilton would exercise actual command.

Though the Federalist leadership believed they were responding to a real threat of imminent hostilities, they also saw political advantage in their anti-French policies. They hoped tension with France would purge Americans of the anti-British prejudices they had acquired during the Revolutionary War. The Federalists assumed that in a world where one could not have good relations with one of the great powers without having bad relations with the other, alignment—if not alliance—with Britain was more in the nation’s interest than alignment with France. The farce the French had repeatedly made of their constitutions showed they could not be depended upon. Because Britain looked like a stable monarchy, she could protect the United States from France’s wrath in two ways. Britain’s navy could serve as a barrier against French harassment and invasion while a mercantile association with the former mother country assured the young republic’s prosperity and public credit. Gerry’s and Barlow’s efforts to mend fences in Paris ran counter to the course pursued by the Federalist-controlled Congress.

In July 1798, Barlow wrote James Watson that Gerry had gotten the Directory to agree to receive a new American minister, to drop all demands for apologies and money, and to disavow all the seizures and piracies that had taken place since the previous autumn. The French government had reacted to the hard line that the Adams administration was pursuing with little more than an embargo on American vessels in France’s ports. Barlow was confident that this would soon be lifted, which made it important that the next move come from the Adams administration. Otherwise, the result would be full-scale war. Barlow warned against allying with Britain, which had barely survived the 1797 mutinies in its fleet and was nearing financial exhaustion. He predicted Britain would abandon any alliance with the United States the minute France offered peace.²⁴ And he discounted the significance of Britain’s naval victory over the French and Spanish fleets off Portuguese Cape St. Vincent in February, 1798, perhaps already banking on the success of Fulton’s submarine.

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Barlow found working with Fulton more rewarding than his efforts at private diplomacy. Though the Directory had rejected Fulton’s first proposal for a “Nautilus,” the patent he secured for his system of small canals attracted the attention of French engineers and led to the translation of his Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation. When Napoleon Bonaparte heard about Fulton’s ideas, he asked for more information before departing on his Egyptian campaign. Fulton also sent him a French translation of his 1797 pamphlet “On Freedom of Trade and Why Foreign Possessions and Duties on Imports, Far from Being Beneficial to Nations Are Prejudicial to Them.” Predictably, it failed to appeal to someone who dreamt of conquering the Middle East.

Nonetheless, the tightening of the British blockade led the minister of marine to reconsider and appoint a commission to evaluate Fulton’s “Nautilus” proposal. A presentation involving a model of the underwater craft took place on August 7, 1798, at the lodgings Fulton shared with the Barlows. The commission subsequently endorsed in principle what it called the “bateau-poisson” as a possible counter to Britain’s naval preponderance but recommended so many modifications in design that the ministry of marine discarded it for the moment. Among other things, the morality of submarine warfare proved to be controversial.

When Barlow was not counseling Fulton about France’s bureaucracy, he was dealing with the financial difficulties of his commercial partners. Prior to the salt ventures of the Friendship and the Rachel, Barlow had been concerned with Robert Lyle in the voyage of the Nagle. The vessel had arrived in Le Havre after Barlow departed for Algiers, and Ruth in her letters to him mentioned the possibly of the Nagle’s cargo spoiling before it could be sold. The first sign that Lyle might be in serious trouble was his inability to pay Barlow’s note for 15,000 livres when it came due in April 1798. Barlow loaned Lyle an additional 3,000 livres in June so he could stay in the salt venture. When the Friendship and Rachel failed to arrive before the new harvest, Barlow realized he might lose the 45,814 livres, or roughly $8,500, that Lyle now owed him.²⁵

To recover so substantial a sum, Barlow asked Lyle to transfer some of his other assets to him. In partnership with a Virginian named John R. Dabney, Lyle had sent the Danish brigantine, Altona, on a slaving voyage to Africa. Her principal investors ordered her to Surinam and then Boston before returning to Europe. Barlow would not have chosen to have an interest in a slaver had Lyle possessed other assets. Even then Dabney refused to transfer Lyle’s interest in the vessel until Lyle settled his accounts with Dabney. Since Lyle was in England, Barlow asked for his power of attorney and his papers. They revealed that Dabney was deeply indebted to Lyle, which eventually enabled Barlow to force Dabney’s consent to the transfer. Because the vessel was at sea, the only way Barlow could be sure of securing his share was to have vessel and cargo attached when it arrived at a U.S. port. Barlow worried that other creditors would beat him to it, now that he was aware of the financial weakness of both Dabney and Lyle. He also had to fend off the claim of another American merchant in Bordeaux, who maintained Dabney had already assigned to him the interest Barlow now claimed.²⁶

Dabney’s problems turned out to be even greater than Lyle’s. Dabney eventually had to convey all his remaining interest in the Altona to Hichborn and Hichborn’s son-in-law. Barlow tried to keep both Lyle and Dabney afloat, though, because, apart from advertising Barlow’s involvement in a trade he abhorred, the failure of the one would destroy the other. Barlow’s success in doing so, while others struggled, derived from his previous investments in Parisian real estate and the compensation the U.S. government paid him in hard money for his services in Algeria. Between the two, he had the margin required both to honor his debts and to help friends like Lyle. He was even strong enough to invest in a cargo of cotton and sugar from Portugal that the firm of Strobel and Martini in Bordeaux offered him.²⁷

A South Carolinian by birth, Daniel Strobel had come in the early 1790s to Bordeaux, where he entered into partnership with a Dutchman named Theodore Peters. Barlow had made their acquaintance in Paris during 1793, when they were trying to free their vessels from embargoes. After the Barlows returned to Paris in 1795, they got to know Strobel, who by then had entered a new partnership with Gotlieb Martini from Latvia. During the next decade Strobel and Martini would emerge as Bordeaux’s largest commission house in the American trade. Barlow’s dual citizenship proved useful to them in protecting their cargoes as Franco-American relations soured.²⁸

Financial pressures in Europe did lead Barlow to try liquidating his American assets. In August he sent William Little of Boston a power of attorney to collect his debts in the United States.²⁹ The four shares of the Ohio Company acquired in 1787 were his most valuable possession, though he had no idea how valuable. On October 24, 1798, he gave James Watson full power to dispose of them if he thought it advantageous to do so. Barlow also tried to settle his accounts with John Fellows, the New York bookseller who had arranged for the first American publication of Barlow’s Letter to the National Convention on the defects of the Constitution of 1791; Advice to the privileged order (Part II) and the first English translation of Letter Addressed to the people of Piedmont. In 1794 Barlow had consigned to Fellows a trunk containing multiple sets of the French encyclopedia, which currently ran to fifty-six volumes, hoping the sets would sell for between $250 to $300 each. Barlow wanted payment for another consignment of books he had forwarded to Fellows from Hamburg in June 1795. Finally, in 1796, Fellows had published Barlow’s collected political essays. Barlow also asked Matthew Carey of Philadelphia to pay for the hundred unbound copies of The Vision of Columbus he had sent just before he left New York in 1788. He drew on Fellows and Carey for the full amount of what he thought was his due plus interest, which in Carey’s case consisted of almost half the total, since the debt was more than a decade old.³⁰

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On October 2, 1798, news from America about how the Federalists were using the XYZ Dispatches impelled Barlow to write George Washington. Though Barlow had known Washington in the army, he could not presume that Washington remembered him except as the author of The Vision of Columbus and as the American consul in Algiers who had freed 120 Americans. So Barlow got right to the point, which was to prevent the war he thought Washington’s appointment as supreme commander of an expanded army “contemplate[d]” (395).³¹ Barlow gave his own outline of the dispute, though with considerably more tact than he had used in writing Abraham Baldwin, attributing the current state of the Franco-American relationship “simply and literally [to] a misunderstanding. . . . It is clear that neither” of the respective governments “has an interest in going to war with the other; and I am convinced that neither of them has the inclination” (396). But while “the balance of inclination as well as of interest . . . is in favor of peace, . . . each government [was] ignorant of it with respect to the other” (396–97).

Barlow sought to persuade Washington “that the French Directory is at present sincerely desirous of restoring harmony between this country and the United States, on terms advantageous to both parties” (397). In addition to the points he had made in his letter to Watson, Barlow stressed two new developments. The French had lifted their embargo on American vessels (398), and the Directory contemplated “a just indemnity for spoliations on . . . American commerce.” Barlow observed that “the Directory considers these declarations and transactions as a sufficient overture on its part,” adding “that a refusal on the part of the American government to meet on” such an open ground would “be followed by immediate war . . . of the most terrible and vindictive kind” (399). When Barlow saw “two great nations rushing on each other’s bayonettes [sic] without any cause of contention, but a misunderstanding,” he felt he had no choice but to beseech Washington to use his influence to postpone hostilities at least “till a word of explanation can pass” between the aggrieved parties in favor of a new attempt at negotiation (401).

Washington forwarded Barlow’s letter to Adams, with a cautious endorsement. Though he couldn’t decide whether it had been written with “a very good, or a very bad design,” he was certain that “the French Directory knew about the letter” and deferred to Adams about how to respond.³² When Adams appointed a new minister to France in the middle of February 1799, he went out of his way to assure Washington that he was responding to Talleyrand’s overtures rather than to Barlow. In Adams’s estimate Barlow’s letter to Washington betrayed “unequivocal Symptoms of blackness of heart,” particularly the passages threatening war if the United States government failed to embrace an accommodation.³³ Adams had ample justification for feeling angry with Barlow’s depiction of him as a mad president after Barlow’s March 4 letter to Baldwin was published, but it is just as well Barlow wasn’t privy to Adams’s feelings. A memorandum Barlow and Fulwar Skipwith submitted to the Directory in February 1799 to promote a diplomatic resolution to the crisis depicted Adams as acting with restraint in response to France’s depredations on American shipping.³⁴ It is unlikely that Barlow would have been able to represent Adams in so flattering a light had he known what the president thought of him.

Barlow was far more concerned with avoiding war between the French and American republics than with two Federalists measures the Fifth Congress passed towards the end of its second session. These were the Alien Friends Act, which gave the president power to deport aliens he deemed a threat to the nation’s security, and the Sedition Act, which gave federal courts jurisdiction over seditious libels against the national government. Barlow had no way of knowing that both acts would seriously affect his future. The first hounded Constantine Volney out of the United States; the second led to the prosecution of Vermont congressman, Matthew Lyon, for publishing a copy of Barlow’s March 4 letter to Abraham Baldwin.

Baldwin had received the letter in the midst of the Republican rout in the Fifth Congress and had sought to rally those who still opposed Federalist measures by reading passages from it aloud to them. Lyon was among the Republican stalwarts impressed by Barlow’s warnings, and he asked Baldwin’s permission to copy the letter. Baldwin consented after Lyon promised not to publish it, but someone subsequently persuaded Lyon’s wife that Lyon’s reelection depended on its publication. A version appeared on September 1, 1798, in The Scourge of Aristocracy, an obscure Vermont publication edited by Lyon’s son James. When Lyon found out about it, he suppressed the publication as far as possible to honor his pledge to Baldwin. But that did not stop him from making all the verbal use he could of Barlow’s text, nor did it stop the government from prosecuting Lyon for the seditious sentiments contained in it.³⁵

In late 1798, the “angry tone” of James Watson’s reply to his July letter led Barlow to suspect that his March 4 letter to Abraham Baldwin might have gotten into “the wrong hands.”³⁶ Though Watson pretended only to report the response which “will be generally entertained by the people of this Country” to the Directory, it was clear that Watson now regarded Barlow as an adversary rather than a friend. Watson claimed that the American people had “never supposed that it was the object of the french government to make war upon them,” while the French gained much by a “system of piracy & plunder.” Neither the American government nor its people wanted anything other than peace with France, “but it must be a fair and honorable” one, “not one that invites french Anarchists to inter-meddle in our elections, to debauch our citizens and to vilify our government—not one which exposes us to French insults and rapacity at home and abroad & exhibits us to the world, in the person of our envoys, as a spectacle for derision.”

Watson construed the overtures in which Barlow put so much stock as “a set of new snares for our entanglement.” What drew his most vehement condemnation, however, was Barlow’s warning about a “terrible and vindictive” war. Watson denied the U.S. government had any intention of entering into an alliance with Britain. Instead, it hoped to preserve the nation’s neutrality and independence, though it was prepared to sacrifice the former if it became inconsistent with the latter. Then it would make no difference whether Britain made peace with France. America would defend itself no matter what the cost. Far from being “moved by the terrors of a french invasion,” Watson claimed Americans feared France’s enmity “less than her friendship—The examples of Holland, Switzerland & the Italian States are before them & they teach them to think of france as of the beautiful female figure which crushed the bones and pierced with darts the victims it embraced.”

Only toward the end of the winter of 1799 did Barlow learn for certain that his letter to Baldwin of the previous year was being used to magnify the problem he had hoped it would resolve. The letter had failed to attract much attention before November 5, 1798, when the Connecticut Courant published a version. Then, on November 24, “Americanus” published in Boston’s Columbian Centinel a paraphrase of it, accompanied with a scathing denunciation. “Americanus” claimed that next to the publication of the “dispatches of our Envoys,” Barlow’s letter “contains the most complete discovery of the views of the five-headed monster of France, and of their partisans in this country.” The Centinel also reproduced the Courant’s introduction to the text of the letter that attributed Barlow’s supposed apostasy to the “accursed demoralizing powers of that modern French philosophy which has made of Europe a charnel house.” A month later the Centinel published a full copy of Barlow’s letter under the heading “QUINTESSENCE OF VILLAINY.” The editor attributed his delay in offering a complete text to an initial unwillingness to “promulgate the degradation of a Man, whom every American once revered for talents, patriotism, and erudition.”³⁷

Barlow responded to his vilification with a short essay entitled On the system of policy hitherto pursued by our government. In it he made no attempt to deny that he was the author of the letter the Centinel had republished, though he claimed “every part” of the version that had appeared there “is mutilated and distorted more or less” (366).³⁸ Comparison of the two texts reveals that while many words had been changed, alterations to the sense of the original were fewer than Barlow claimed. Barlow’s assertions that the letter had been drafted in haste and that he had never intended it to be published were more convincing. However, he refused to retract his substantive criticism of the conduct of the U.S. executive toward France or his judgment that the United States could have settled its differences with France at much less cost “had your negotiations been properly managed” (367). All Barlow would concede was that had he realized his letter to Baldwin would be published, he would have mentioned the errors of France, among which the “villany”[sic] portrayed in the dispatches was the worst.

Barlow’s American critics were not to assume he approved of France’s “monstrous system of piracy and plunder” (368). He had repeatedly protested their “injustice and violence committed” (368–69) against American interests. While such actions reflected France’s resentment of the Jay Treaty, Barlow had always maintained that the French response was “far greater than the occasion would justify.” He also acknowledged that France had committed many “blunders, or crimes” in the course of its revolution (369). But when the “difficulties and incentives to ungovernable passions that have lain in the way of its leaders” were taken into account, the marvel was “why they have committed so few” rather than “why they have committed so many” (370). America had fewer excuses for squandering its opportunity for demonstrating that a “perfect liberty of commerce . . . would have a powerful tendency . . . to maintain a perpetual peace between countries separated by the ocean” (370–71).

The United States was uniquely positioned to champion this idea not just because a great ocean stood between it and most of its trading partners but also because the balance of trade was always against it. The ocean protected America against invasion, while the balance of trade placed in her hands “a most powerful weapon of defense” (372) against maritime aggression. As Barlow’s 1793 memo had argued, the United States should have notified Britain that “all property taken unjustly from [our] citizens . . . [would] be compensated by so much property of the subjects [of the offending power] found within your jurisdiction.” No injustice would be involved because Britain had been the aggressor (373). Nor should Americans worry about the British denying them credit or about the sequestration of debts being dishonorable. Sequestration was morally preferable to outright plunder, and the eagerness of British manufacturers to extend credit to any and all comers suggested that being denied credit was the last thing Americans need worry about.

Barlow suspected that those who stressed credit had another agenda, namely, the preservation of public credit. He repeated his assertion in Part II of Advice to the Privileged Orders that the capacity to borrow money was “an instrument too dangerous to be trusted in the hands” of any government (376). Now, however, he was able to point concretely to an abuse of that power. Instead of a shrinking debt and lower interest rates, the nation was accumulating debt at twice the rate of interest Hamilton had initially offered creditors in 1790. Concern for the nation’s public credit had then led its Federalist leadership to align with and imitate Britain. He preferred France’s condition of being “unable . . . to borrow money on any terms, even from her own citizens” (381). Despite this, France had continued to spend prodigious sums on the war.

Barlow realized that when hostilities ceased, France’s “debt will be enormous, and in a very depreciated state.” But he hoped she would not follow America’s example of “funding it, in all its undistinguished forms and accumulated size.” Instead, he preferred to see the debt “cut up into paper money, given out to the creditors, and then . . . collected and burnt, in the course of three years” through taxation. Such a policy “would be less unjust, and less impolitic, than to increase it [the debt] tenfold . . . and fix . . . it upon the nation forever at the highest rate of interest known” (381). A “middle course” might have been found in America “had there been no speculators in congress, or about the treasury” (382). Barlow evidently approved of France’s funding only one-third of its consolidated debt in 1797 and forcing its creditors to accept bearer bonds for the remaining two-thirds, without much prospect that either the principal or interest on them would ever be paid.³⁹ The United States would be better off relying on “the debts you [are] constantly owing and renewing with all the nations that had it in their power to menace your repose” (383) for protection and should never have agreed to forego their sequestration in the Jay Treaty. Not only had that treaty produced a rupture with France, but it had ushered in an incalculable expense in the form of a navy. “It is the siphon put in suction, which can never stop, or moderate its action, till all that feeds it is exhausted” (384). America would be safer if it entirely eschewed a navy because then none of the naval powers of Europe would have an incentive to attack her.

France had “not yet reduced to practice, the liberty she has vindicated in theory,” but this lapse was “owing to the prolongation of revolutionary measures, necessitated by the state of Europe, and not to a forgetfulness of principle.” She had been unable to take measures to establish the freedom of the seas because “she has not yet arrived at that state of tranquility which will enable her to look beyond present exigencies, to plans of permanent improvement.” In contrast, during a decade of unparalleled prosperity and peace, the U.S. government had succeeded in doing nothing besides increasing the nation’s debt and imitating Europe’s “follies” (392–93). Barlow had hoped that America would use its privileged position “to lay the foundation of an edifice that should . . . afford a shelter to the human race.” The nation should have reformulated the law of nations, which disproportionately favored belligerent over neutral powers, upon principles of “reason, justice and . . . peace.” Then, when France came to her senses, the world could have witnessed “the two greatest republics on earth, not only enjoying liberty themselves, but recommending it to others by removing the occasion of wars.” If the United States was only capable of copying “precedents from old monarchies,” it was time for despair because the “perfectibility of human society” would have to be abandoned in favor of men reconciling themselves “to slavery, monarchy, and perpetual war” (393).

Barlow wrote his On the system of policy hitherto pursued by our government to repair his injured reputation in America and sent several copies of the pamphlet—first printed in English by John Hurford Stone’s Parisian press—to friends and former associates in the United States.⁴⁰ William Lee got one, which he finally acknowledged after more than a year of silence. Barlow also sent a copy to his former friend Lemuel Hopkins in Hartford with the request that he get Hudson and Goodwin of the Connecticut Courant to reprint it. He was aware that the Courant had been the vehicle for some of the abuse directed against him but assumed that it would be willing to publish the piece because “the name of an Arch Traitor like your old friend” was sure to “excite a curiosity very useful to Booksellers.” Finally, he sent a copy to John Fellows in New York, urging him to arrange for its publication “without regard to copyright.”⁴¹ Despite these efforts, Barlow would have to wait until 1801 for it to be published in the United States.