14 Responding to France's Apostasy

Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Responding to France’s Apostasy

The purchase of a Parisian mansion did not prevent Barlow’s thoughts from turning homeward, but it complicated the task of returning to America. By the time he had moved their modest possessions to the new address, the progress of the American commissioners negotiating with Talleyrand, together with accounts from overseas, had convinced Barlow that American politics was moving in a new direction. The restoration of amity between the United States and France favored Thomas Jefferson’s bid for the presidency, but that was not enough by itself to lure Barlow back to his native land. He also sought a mission that was more attractive than the comfortable exile his Parisian mansion now made possible. On September 15, 1800, he wrote to Jefferson suggesting an idea that had been germinating since Barlow’s return to Paris from Algeria. He had come to view education as the most eligible way to protect America from the corruption and cynicism he saw subverting the Revolution in France.¹

Washington’s will—mentioning the establishment of a national university— had recently been published in France. Barlow urged that a national institute similar to the one France had created with the Constitution of 1795 be established. “The present state of knowledge presents us with little more than a confused idea of the immense . . . unknown that lies before us; and we lose the principle advantages of the little that is known for want of proper methods of teaching it to our children.” Barlow’s proposed “Polysophic Society” would serve four functions: expanding scientific knowledge, exploring the resources of the United States, teaching people how to communicate this knowledge to others, and furnishing schools with trained teachers by paying part of their salaries. He saw his proposal as encouraging “uniformity . . . in manners, language & sentiments of the people” and cultivating “a strict adherence to republican principles.” Considering “how much their happiness depends on their political Union,” both were necessary given the extent of the United States and “the variety of their pursuits.”²

Barlow obviously was eager to head such a society, but he was equally receptive to a major diplomatic appointment in Europe. The new secretary of state, James Madison, learned from John Dawson that Barlow and Fulwar Skipwith were both prepared to serve if asked. Dawson recommended that Barlow replace William Vans Murray as ambassador to the Dutch Republic.³ Instead, Jefferson recalled Murray, who was a Federalist, without replacing him and declined to comment on Barlow’s proposal about a national learned society.

The visible tightening of Napoleon’s rule after the December 24, 1800, attempt on the First Consul’s life enhanced Barlow’s growing disillusionment with the regime. In August 1801, he wrote Abraham Baldwin that he and Ruth were now “seriously at work” about returning to America, though he acknowledged that “after all that has been said on this subject in former years,” Baldwin might not be prepared to believe him.⁴ By this time several long-standing obstacles to going home had been removed. With Duer’s death in 1799, Barlow no longer had to fear a suit to recover damages from the bills he had protested and refused to pay in 1790. Then Jefferson’s presidency made Washington an attractive alternative to Connecticut. Barlow felt drawn to the nation’s capital for the same reasons he had been drawn to Paris in the 1790s—he was becoming convinced that the future of republicanism lay there. Writing to Jefferson in August 1801, Barlow observed that if the American people ever degenerated the way the French people had, “mankind will perhaps never be compensated for your unpardonable neglect.”⁵

The Barlows grew increasingly disillusioned with France’s politics just as personal ties with their French friends deepened. Among the more captivating of these was Madame de Villette, a distinguished neighbor on the rue de Vaugirard. Born Philiberte de Varicourt, the daughter of an impoverished noble family near Voltaire’s country estate, she had grown up to be beautiful and intelligent enough to attract that great man’s attention. He supervised her education, bestowed upon her the title of “Belle et Bonne,” and then enticed the wealthy second Marquis de Villette to marry her. De Villette had homosexual leanings, and the marriage was an unhappy one, but it did result in the birth of several children. The oldest to survive into adulthood, Charlotte, came to resemble her mother as she matured; a younger child named Charles eventually became the third Marquis de Villette. His father had died in 1793 of natural causes before the Terror could claim him. Because the second marquis had been part of the Girondin circle and Madame de Villette’s brother had died in the queen’s service, Madame was imprisoned until Thermidor.

Half of the second marquis’s income terminated with his death, and his remaining properties were despoiled during Madame’s incarceration. Upon being freed sometime after August 1794, she tried recovering as much of his estate as possible. As an economy measure, she moved into a building near the one the Barlows would acquire on the rue de Vaugirard, where she took in visiting Americans. Several of the peace commissioners appointed by President Adams in 1797 stayed with her. Talleyrand later identified Madame de Villette as the unnamed woman referred to in the XYZ Dispatches whom Marshall claimed had urged the American commissioners to bow to France’s demands. But Marshall himself was charmed by her, and she, for her part, was genuinely drawn to Americans, preferring their forthrightness to the affectations of Parisian society.⁶

When Charlotte died from scarlet fever in 1801, Madame de Villette had difficulty accepting her daughter’s death. Barlow joined several French poets in penning verses of condolence to assuage her grief, and Fulton did a portrait of Charlotte from memory that Madame considered very lifelike. Sharing her sorrow and grief made them all fast friends, and in subsequent years de Villette repeatedly overwhelmed the Barlows with her hospitality.

Some of Napoleon’s domestic initiatives met with Barlow’s approval. The uniform civil code that the First Consul spent a great deal of time and effort developing during 1801 was the most important of these, though its completion and full implementation had to wait until 1804. The economic benefits of Napoleonic rule, which included giving the franc a precise metallic value, were also welcome. Fiscal reforms enhanced the state’s revenues, enabling the government to meet some of its obligations with hard money. That initiated an appreciation of public funds that Barlow had long expected.⁷ A preliminary truce in October 1801, which eventuated in the Peace of Amiens with Britain in March 1802, pointed towards continued prosperity. Such positive developments deterred Barlow from concluding that Napoleon’s rule was incompatible with Europe’s liberty, despite the gradual reintroduction of facets of the ancien régime and the increasing concentration of power in one person. Nor could Barlow ever be sure the First Consul would not prove as transitory as the Directory and soon be replaced by something better.

Napoleonic prosperity allowed Barlow to trumpet his new gentility. The congratulatory letter he wrote to President Jefferson in August 1801 described his private affairs as now “on such a footing” as to allow him “to devote the remainder of my life . . . to the promotion of the solid improvements” in the “moral, political, & economical” nature of the United States.⁸ But his brother Aaron’s death in 1800 failed immediately to expand Barlow’s sense of familial obligation, though he was willing to use his brother’s male offspring to establish his Ohio claims. After one of Aaron’s surviving sons visited France in 1802, Barlow gave all of them a power of attorney to settle his western lands. They would only receive the value of the improvements they made rather than full ownership. Barlow’s caution reflected a number of unknowns. Apart from uncertainty about the status of his Ohio Company shares, he had little knowledge of Aaron’s family. Some sons could be more worthy than others, and together they might exhaust his resources. Prudence dictated waiting until he could learn more about the family, especially as he was unfamiliar with American land values. He had yet to feel secure enough as a gentleman to rely fully on relatives he didn’t know.

Barlow’s sense of financial wellbeing received a boost from the rise in Parisian real estate values. Toward the end of 1801 the annual draft was suspended, and an eighth of the men who had served longest in the ranks received furloughs, signaling to an exhausted nation that it could look forward to a period of external quiet and internal reconstruction. As cities that had previously been drained of men began to recover their populations, the demand for real estate increased, making the mansion on the rue de Vaugirard appear to be a sound investment. But owning an appreciating asset in a rising market and actually selling it were two different things, as Barlow would learn when he tried to dispose of his Parisian properties. Lady Emma Hamilton, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s mistress, showed no interest in Barlow’s mansion when he offered it to her in 1801. In 1802 disillusionment with Napoleon led Barlow to turn to Benjamin Jarvis, an American residing in Hamburg.⁹

By then Barlow had grown anxious to free himself from all that bound him to France, and he sweetened the offer by including his other properties in the city. He also proposed that Jarvis pay for them with an annuity rather than in cash. The arrangement would give Jarvis and his heirs full title upon the death of both Barlows. There is no record of Jarvis’s response to this proposal, and the Barlows remained at 50 rue de Vaugirard until the autumn of 1804. Well before they moved out, Barlow signified to Fulton that he was willing to sell for much less than his original asking price, though one that would still leave him with a profit.¹⁰

Barlow’s improved economic circumstances never completely freed him from commerce. His involvement with ventures sponsored by Strobel and Martini continued into the new century. He also started purchasing on speculation the rights to disputed prizes and their cargoes in Britain and France. But increased economic security enabled Barlow to proclaim his gentility by undertaking several literary tasks from which he could expect little return. One was translating portions of Constantin Volney’s Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791).

The work addressed the question of why the great empires of the past had all disappeared. Volney argued that the illusion of future compensation for present disappointments had permitted rulers to oppress their subjects to the point where they rebelled. The empires would have been better served by a morality rooted in experience and nature. As a Girondin sympathizer, Volney had been imprisoned at the beginning of the Terror. After his release, he emigrated to America, where he sought to remedy the deficiencies in a 1792 English translation of the Ruines that had appeared in London. During 1795 a second English version was published in Philadelphia that claimed to be corrected by the author. Volney was still not satisfied, however, especially after this version drew the fire of Joseph Priestley, who had recently settled in Pennsylvania.

Priestley objected to Volney’s total rejection of revelation and in 1797 challenged him to debate the subject. Volney declined, though he did admit his comparative treatment of the world’s religions was intended to generate a spirit of religious doubt.¹¹ Priestley’s attack on Volney’s “infidelity” brought the immigrant French philosophe into the sights of American Federalists. They made him the embodiment of the religious and political threat France posed to the United States during the Franco-American crisis of 1798. The Alien Friends Law of 1798 was directed principally at Volney. It induced him to return to France and saved John Adams the trouble of deporting him. But before Volney departed, he provided Jefferson with a French version of the Ruines. Jefferson translated its first twenty chapters dealing with political rather than religious matters.

The remaining four chapters comprised half of the total text, and chapter 22, entitled “The Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas,” was by far the longest. In it, Volney argued that similarities in different religious systems reflected primitive efforts to comprehend astronomical events controlling the seasons. Since the fabricators of these systems lacked concepts for extraterrestrial phenomena, they had resorted to figurative language, which accounted for the variations in their fables. The premise behind Volney’s argument, that man created God rather than vice versa, was antithetical to the beliefs of American Christians, and after the Federalists started using Jefferson’s religious skepticism against him, he abandoned his translation.

Barlow and Volney had known each other since the early 1790s, and Volney wasted no time upon his return to France in asking Barlow to complete the task.¹² Barlow needed little persuading because he had grown interested in finding a common source to the different religions. His exposure to a wide array of religious practices besides American and British Protestantism—including Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism—made him skeptical about the claims of each to an exclusive truth. Barlow took his translation seriously, cutting short a pleasure trip he and Ruth made during the spring of 1801 to Moulins, nestled in the foothills of the Massif central, to work on it. Barlow’s translation of the last part of the Ruines was completed sometime later in 1801 under Volney’s supervision.

The English language edition of 1802 printed in Paris remained the standard one until it was supplanted by another American version in 1822. The title page of the 1802 edition failed to identify any translator because both of the responsible parties now preferred avoiding public identification with Volney’s ideas. As returning to America became more compelling, Barlow grew increasingly mindful of his reputation among his countrymen. The Ruins would prove to be a tough sell in an America beset by the religious fervor accompanying the Second Great Awakening.

Barlow’s other literary project, a major revision of The Vision of Columbus, would occupy him off and on for the next five years. It is not clear when he began it since Barlow’s epic was always a work in progress, but now his revisions reflected his conclusion that France’s abandonment of its republicanism was irreversible. That made the 1793 Parisian edition of The Vision of Columbus, which still accorded France a vanguard role in disseminating revolutionary republicanism, seem inappropriate. Barlow’s 1802 notebook contains many poetic ideas, as well as some lines of poetry, that eventually found their way into what became a new poem.

The plebiscite held on May 8–14, 1802, which made Napoleon First Consul for life with the power to nominate his successor, constituted a major turning point for Barlow. Charles Pinckney reported to Madison that the prospect of the plebiscite had thrown Barlow into despair, since it restored the monarchy—though not the Bourbon monarchy—in all but name.¹³ Barlow’s disenchantment with Napoleon was made more intense by his realization that the peace the First Consul had bestowed upon Europe did not extend to America. Well before the Treaty of Amiens went into effect, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Charles-Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, had been dispatched with a sizeable army to reconquer Sainte Domingue. Jefferson watched this development with suspicion and seriously contemplated aligning the American republic with Britain to check Napoleon’s military ambitions in the New World. Leclerc’s expedition purged Barlow of any remaining inclination to view the interests of France and the United States as identical. Barlow attributed his change of heart to the growing “depravity of the men in power and the rapid degradation of those principles of liberty and morality among the leaders” of France.¹⁴

During the summer of 1802, Barlow received a letter from Jefferson inviting him to settle in Washington and undertake another literary project. “Mr. Madison and myself have cut out a piece of work for you, which is to write the history of the United States, from the close of the war downwards.” They would provide Barlow with access to all the archives as well as personal information that had never been committed to “paper.”¹⁵ Jefferson even suggested a house the Barlows might acquire near the capitol. The letter, which ought to have seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to escape from Napoleon’s tyranny, instead ignited Barlow’s anxieties and conflicted feelings about leaving France. Most of them focused on the issue of real estate, suggesting he regarded ownership as a burden as much as a pleasure. Barlow worried about the cost of the Washington house, about whether the garden was a new one or one that had been fully planted, and about the property’s location. One of the many tourists visiting the French capital that summer was familiar with the house. Barlow wrote Jefferson that it sounded ideal in all respects but its size and cost, which were prohibitive.¹⁶

There was another problem: The president and Madison were in a rush. The history they wanted Barlow to write was supposed to counteract the influence they feared John Marshall’s projected biography of Washington might have on the election of 1804. Barlow was not prepared to drop everything and hazard an autumn Atlantic crossing to meet such a deadline. Furthermore, he was reluctant to abandon his involvement with some of Fulton’s projects.

Fulton’s attempts to perfect the Nautilus had stalled over the problem of delivering an explosive charge to a target. Repeated failures, together with the preliminaries of the Peace of Amiens, led Fulton to abandon the project and dismantle the Nautilus. Developing a steam-powered surface vessel quickly replaced work on the submarine after Fulton met Robert R. Livingston, Jefferson’s newly appointed ambassador to France, at the beginning of 1802. Livingston, the patriarch of a powerful Republican family from upstate New York, had experimented with developing steam-powered vessels before coming to Europe. Though none of Livingston’s designs were successful, he had secured a twenty-year monopoly of steam navigation on the Hudson from the New York legislature, conditional on successfully demonstrating that the vessel could make headway against the river’s current. That gave Livingston a compelling interest in partnering with someone who could solve the technical problems, while Livingston provided much needed capital. Though Fulton was receptive to working with Livingston, neither he nor Barlow were sure that the project would not meet with the same fate as the submarine.

Barlow facilitated the collaboration as best he could because he regarded Fulton as a surrogate son and realized that Livingston had assets Fulton was unlikely to find elsewhere. But helping them was not without personal cost. Despite Livingston’s Republican credentials, the new ambassador resembled Gouverneur Morris more than James Monroe. By this time Barlow was the most distinguished of the expatriate Americans living in Paris, and it would have been logical for Livingston to have sought him out. At first the two men kept their distance. That they eventually came to see each other often was largely due to Fulton making Barlow his agent in negotiating an arrangement with Livingston. The negotiation proved difficult because Livingston was reluctant to give Fulton more weight in their association than absolutely necessary. For Barlow, working out an accommodation between two headstrong egotists required time and patience. Rather than struggle with frustration in Paris, Fulton preferred to accompany Ruth to a spa at Plombières, where she could take the water cure her Parisian physicians had recommended.

Ruth’s health continued to be the most imposing obstacle to the Barlows’ return to America. Though she had benefited from her summer visit to Le Havre in 1800, for the remainder of their stay in Europe her health would increasingly preoccupy them both. By the summer of 1802, her complaint was described as tumors on the buttocks and genital area. If these tumors were genital warts, they would have been sexually transmitted, with Fulton the more likely agent than Barlow, assuming the triangle had acquired a sexual dimension. But it is also possible that the “tumors” were cysts that had other sources.

Barlow wrote letters to Ruth and Fulton at Plombières that referred to them as lovers. However, the relationship between Fulton and Ruth resembled more that between a mother and her favorite son, even if it had once been otherwise. If Barlow derived pleasure from thinking they were together, as some have claimed, it derived less from imagining they were lovers than from being reassured Ruth was receiving the care and attention she needed. Barlow’s letters to them during that summer reveal a man obsessed with his wife’s health, which initially worsened under the regime of the water cure. The evidence supporting the idea that Barlow “enjoyed” Ruth’s ill health requires one to discount repeated indications to the contrary. We only have his letters, not hers to him, but to judge from his responses, she gave him a good deal to worry about. When she finally reported progress, he was genuinely relieved.¹⁷

Fulton’s willingness to prolong his stay in Plombières with Ruth may have stemmed from a reluctance to bring her back to Paris in a worse state than when they had departed. Plombières was a considerable distance from Paris, so it was not as though they could travel back and forth with ease. Returning Ruth in an improved state of health seemed to be the least Fulton could do, given Barlow’s assiduous attention to his business affairs during the summer of 1802.

Before departing for Plombières, Fulton had convinced Livingston that the crucial problem that needed to be solved was harnessing an engine’s power to a device that could drive a vessel through the water. Fulton was reasonably confident that side-wheels hitched to an endless tread were the solution, provided he could reduce the hull’s water resistance. Using Livingston’s funds, Fulton commissioned an expert model builder in Paris to construct a miniature prototype of such a vessel. After his departure, Fulton relied upon Barlow to expedite its fabrication. The model was finally completed at the end of May, and when it arrived at Plombières, Fulton turned from the routines of spa life to experimenting with it. Before long, his experiments had become part of the spa’s attractions and were witnessed by many fashionable personages, including the future empress and Napoleon’s sister. The results—though not as spectacular as his initial demonstration of the Nautilus in Paris—were sufficiently promising that Fulton wrote Livingston an upbeat letter claiming speeds up to sixteen miles per hour were feasible.¹⁸ Barlow thought the claim exaggerated, but since Fulton had assigned him the task of getting Livingston’s consent to an arrangement in which Fulton’s ideas would count as the equivalent of Livingston’s capital, it at least strengthened Barlow’s bargaining position.

Before undertaking these negotiations, Barlow made a brief trip to Britain. He had last been there in the autumn of 1792, when he and his radical friends were suspected of plotting treason against the crown. A decade’s interval capped by the Peace of Amiens made it possible for him to pursue a claim he had acquired as a speculation to a prize cargo of 219.75 tons of wine in a captured American vessel. On October 22, 1794, James Thayer had shipped the wine from Bordeaux in the Neptune on his and his brother’s joint account. The official clearance showed Hamburg as its destination, though the master acknowledged he was making for Charleston, South Carolina, when his vessel had been seized by HMS Woolich and carried into Tortola. There a local vice-admiralty court freed the vessel, which was indisputably American. But the cargo remained in dispute because of questions about Thayer’s nationality, which were referred to the High Court of Admiralty.¹⁹

During 1802, the status of American property in the British courts had begun brightening thanks to the work of the Anglo-American commission established under article VII of the Jay Treaty. Initially, the commission’s activities had been stymied because it had to pass on British counterclaims involving the unpaid debts of Americans, as well as American claims about unlawful British seizures. The commissioners spent most of their time arguing about minor details until the crown suspended their operations on July 20, 1799, because the few awards made to British creditors were not being paid. Only when the United States guaranteed the sum of six hundred thousand pounds to extinguish unpaid American debts did the commission resume its activities in February 1802.²⁰ Then, a controversy over whether George W. Erving, the U.S. consul-general in London, should serve simultaneously as agent for the U.S. claimants and assessor of the value of their claims threatened further to delay its operations.²¹

When the American commissioners—John Trumbull, Thomas Pinkney, and Christopher Gore—agreed with their British colleagues, Erving resigned his appointment as assessor with its salary of $1,500. The gesture cleared the way for the favorable processing of American claims arising from British seizures in the West Indies during the autumn and winter of 1793–94. Barlow got wind of the change and decided that a visit to London could not hurt. Though no one stopped him entering the kingdom at Dover, he had violated British restrictions on the movement of aliens. However, Ambassador Rufus King managed to smooth matters over by assuring the government that Barlow’s business was private and that he would remain “perfectly quiet” politically.²²

Despite his best efforts to remain incognito, Barlow was recognized soon after his arrival at a London hotel. Erving then secreted Barlow in lodgings near where he and his father lived. Erving also organized several quiet reunions with friends like Horne Tooke and Joseph Johnson. Johnson had been imprisoned in part for publishing Part I of Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders and greeted Barlow good-naturedly with the declaration, “You could not get me hanged, [though] you tried all you could.”²³ Since Johnson had managed to live better in prison than he did at home, there were no hard feelings.

Erving’s success in managing Barlow’s contacts with his old friends led to an enduring friendship between the two men. A native of Massachusetts and the son of a loyalist, Erving had attended Oxford after the Revolutionary War. While James Monroe had been ambassador to France, Erving had shown up in Paris seeking validation of his American citizenship. Not knowing what to make of someone who sounded more British than American, Monroe refused, but that didn’t stop Erving from arranging for the British publication in 1797 of the defense Monroe wrote of his diplomatic mission. On returning to the United States at the turn of the century, Erving played a role in the New York election of 1800, which proved critical to Jefferson’s winning the presidency. Jefferson was grateful enough to honor Erving’s request for an overseas position by appointing him consul general in London.

Erving feared the High Admiralty Court would be governed by the value of the invoice in determining damages if it ruled favorably on Thayer’s nationality. That presented a problem because foreign merchants doing business in the command economy run by the Commission des subsistances customarily had used invoice figures that were 50 percent below “their real specie value in the market at that time.” The permission to export the wine “was considered to be as valuable as the goods themselves.”²⁴ Erving’s advice impelled Barlow to seek an affidavit to that effect from Theodore Peters, who at the time had served as U.S. consul in Bordeaux. But since Peters also had a claim against Thayer, he refused to give Barlow the desired affidavit unless Barlow first guaranteed Peters’s claim in the event Thayer recovered his property.

During his brief visit to England, Barlow also became interested in the American vessel, the Hannah, which had been seized by the British in the West Indies at roughly the same time as the Neptune. This vessel had been sold to French merchants in Bordeaux, who retained an American factor named Church as the ostensible owner to cover it with the American flag. Though Church’s legal ownership of the Hannah was in doubt, Barlow paid £ 9,500 for Church’s and the Hannah captain’s interest in the vessel after the Jay Treaty commissioners began passing favorably on American claims.²⁵

Though the rationale for his eight-day visit to London was business, Barlow found being in Britain surprisingly pleasant. He continued to view the nation as the principal threat to the freedom of the seas and indirectly to the liberty of mankind, but the very fact that Thayer’s claims were being considered in an English court was refreshing. Barlow was also struck by the amenities of London life, which came close to matching those of Paris. Thanks to early industrialization, London’s shops excelled those of Paris. If one wanted to buy ordinary staples of everyday life like stockings, London had the best prices. Paris remained unequaled, though, when it came to the quality and variety of custom-made, luxury goods.

Differences in lady’s fashions also caught Barlow’s attention. Women in London wore dresses that covered their breasts and throats “clear up to the chin,” distinguishing them from the current French fashion, which exposed as much of both as possible. At times this had been carried to the extreme of baring the breast or, as was more customary for Parisian women with the appropriate figures, covering their breasts diaphanously. Some even dampened their bodices to enhance the effect. Barlow entertained Ruth and Fulton with an account of the London visit of Madame Récamier—the famous French beauty immortalized by the painter Jacques-Louis David—who had recently been exiled from Paris for spurning Napoleon’s advances. When, attired in the French fashion, she alighted from her carriage for a walk in a London park, she attracted an unruly crowd. “So fierce was John to look at the little globes, that every tinker would sooner get his eyes knocked out than not have a glance,” Barlow reported.²⁶

The capital of the Anglophone world stirred in Barlow an unexpected sense of excitement. In London, he could never challenge Benjamin West’s claim to preeminence as America’s leading cultural figure. As an English author in Paris, Barlow had enjoyed a certain freedom from the standards of the metropole, but his Parisian prominence came at the cost of the stimulation he would have derived from contact with men like William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, who at the time were emerging as major poets. They would leave a far more enduring legacy than William Hayley, the only English literary figure who took much interest in Barlow’s work.

Barlow’s wrote poignantly about viewing their old lodging at 18 Great Titchfield Street. “I felt such a glow of affection that my limbs fell a trembling & I could hardly walk away.”²⁷ That was a strange response to seeing the residence he and Ruth had occupied after his misadventure with the Scioto Company. Had he forgotten their desperate financial circumstances and the intense effort that was required to establish his literary reputation as a republican ideologue, or had the burden of owning a Parisian mansion made his past struggles seem trivial by comparison? Despite his hostility to monarchies, Barlow could not help feeling affection for Britain because it reminded him of home. Shortly afterward, Henry Redhead Yorke recorded a conversation during which Barlow compared Britain’s prospects favorably to those of France.²⁸

Livingston accepted Fulton’s proposals for the steamboat’s design after a long conversation Barlow had with him on July 17, 1802, objecting only to the scale on which Fulton wanted to build the prototype. Livingston’s desire to keep the vessel as small as possible made it less likely that the costs of construction could be met by selling fares. The realization that Livingston could always team up with another inventor weakened Barlow and Fulton’s bargaining position. At the time, there was no shortage of mechanical ingenuity, both American and European, focused on constructing commercially feasible, steam-powered vessels. Barlow’s attempts to reassure Fulton should Livingston abandon him were never entirely convincing. He argued that Fulton only had to demonstrate the feasibility of his model to a select group of British investors and the funds would become available for building and patenting the vessel in America. Fulton knew Barlow well enough to discount his glib optimism and realize he had best stick with Livingston.

Fulton was in no rush to return to Paris now that his experiments were giving him the upper hand. Since Ruth’s health at last was showing signs of improvement, he felt she would benefit from more time at Plombières. Barlow, for his part, had embarked on another literary project premised on Fulton’s collaboration. This was an epic poem about comprehensive canal systems like the one Fulton had described in his Treatise. Barlow thought the project would provide Fulton’s genius with a new focus after the collapse of the submarine project and before either of them could be sure the partnership with Livingston was leading anywhere. The poem was entitled, “The Canal: a Poem on the application of Physical Science to Political Economy, in four Books.”²⁹

Attempting to render physical science and political economy into poetry did not come naturally. Barlow completed a draft of only half of one book in his customary rhymed couplets. The aborted epic drew what little life it had from two sources that continued to inspire Barlow’s literary efforts. The first was the conviction that one should not be bound by past precedents in a revolutionary age. Though Richard Holmes has argued that the English poets and scientists of this age collaborated in producing what he terms “Romantic science,” the results of the marriage between serious science and poetry were not yet evident. That failed to deter Barlow, who felt the attempt to join the two should be made if positive good might result. The positive good he had in mind was uniting thought to feeling, a legacy of Joseph Buckminster’s insistence that religion devoid of feeling was not true religion. Barlow was not suggesting that science devoid of feeling was not true science, but he did hope that a marriage between them might capture the public’s imagination and by doing so create political conditions that fostered technological innovation.³⁰

When it became clear that Fulton’s heart was not in the project, Barlow suggested he illustrate the reworked Vision of Columbus. Barlow’s exposure to French standards led him to seek an elegant format for the revised version of his epic poem that made the original look primitive. He planned one illustration for each book, plus a frontispiece. He also wanted the artwork executed by an American resident in Europe because the European technique for making plates was more advanced than anything in America. Fulton eventually did a portrait of Barlow in 1805 that depicted him very much as John Vanderlyn had in 1798. (See chapter 12.) Instead of the intense, anxiety-ridden stare shown in the 1793 likeness by Louis-Charles Ruotte and J. J. F. Le Barbier, both Vanderlyn and Fulton represent him as a relaxed, confident gentleman. Fulton’s portrait conveyed the impression of an older, even more serene and gentrified Barlow than Vanderlyn’s sketch, and in doing so mirrored Barlow’s ambitions for his revised epic, whose task had become less to transform the world than to consolidate a world that, like the poem’s author, had already been transformed.

After his return from Britain, much of Barlow’s energy went into revising The Vision of Columbus. A notation dated December 13, 1802, indicates that he had gone through 3,474 lines of the Paris edition of 1793, striking out 526 old lines and writing 1,822 new ones, together with fourteen new notes.³¹ Though it is impossible to tell exactly what part of this revision was executed when, Barlow had reworked more than half the original poem. He did this despite a busy social life that involved dining out most nights. He liked being on his own in the metropolis because it left him free to pursue his literary activities. But not all his time was entirely his own, as he was besieged by invitations from Helen Maria Williams and Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell—Mary Wollstonecraft’s most distinguished female pupil—to attend their soirées. These social distractions complemented as much as they competed with his work. Though he needed periods of solitude for his revision of The Vision of Columbus, similar to the isolation his brother’s Redding house had afforded when he originally composed it, he also welcomed periodic release from them.

Ruth and Fulton returned to Paris in late September 1802. The English landscape artist Joseph Farington recorded the Barlows’ presence at an elegant party Benjamin West hosted on September 27 for more than thirty guests. While Ruth struck Farington as being a “quiet, unassuming woman,” he described Barlow as “tall & bony. His countenance is ill-favored but his look thoughtful & shrewd. To reflect & to observe seem to be his habit, and it is expressed in his appearance. His head is shrunk between his Shoulders, and constantly leans to one side; and one of his hands is invariably placed upon his breast, as it were to support his chin.” Farington’s dislike of Barlow’s politics influenced this description. “As a Reformer of political constitutions,” Farington held him responsible, “with others,” for proving “to the world the danger of endeavouring to carry visionary Theories into practice, at the risk of all the horrors of bloodshed and confusion.”³²

A month later the Barlows attended a celebratory dinner to honor the Polish patriot and veteran of the continental army, Thaddeus Kosciuszko. The affair included more than one hundred persons and attracted the attention of the Parisian press. The Barlows, along with Livingston and Lafayette, were mentioned in published descriptions of the occasion. The story then traveled across the Atlantic, first appearing in the Columbian Courier of New Bedford on Christmas Eve. It was widely copied in the Republican press and eventually made its way to Washington. Abraham Baldwin read the account in the National Intelligencer and congratulated Ruth on the fine company she was keeping.³³ The Barlows had become celebrities.

Work on Barlow’s new epic slowed after Ruth and Fulton returned to Paris, but he was glad to be relieved of the burden of negotiating with Livingston. Fulton and Livingston finally agreed to build a model steamboat that was to be powered by two side-wheels capable of towing several barges in its wake. But between Livingston’s instincts for economy and the sabotage of the Seine bargemen—who feared competition and sank the first prototype before it could be tested—the demonstration of its capabilities did not take place until the summer of 1803. Ruth would be present with many of her friends at what by all accounts was a success “complet et brilliant,” but both Livingston and Barlow were out of town.³⁴

Livingston was on his way to Switzerland to escape the summer heat. He undoubtedly heard glowing accounts of the event, which was witnessed by many fashionable Parisians. The next step was to buy a British engine, export it to America, and install it on a vessel of American construction. Almost four years would elapse before that step was taken, however, because the resumption of the European war in 1803 led the British government to entice Fulton into resuming work on his submarine in preference to returning to America or remaining in France.

Barlow missed the demonstration of Fulton’s steamboat because he was in London trying to complete the business that had taken him there the preceding spring. This second sojourn in the British capital lasted from the middle of March until the beginning of August 1803 and was inspired by the collapse of the Peace of Amiens. Barlow’s claims depended on the British courts honoring the rights of neutrals, which he had reason to fear they might restrict once war resumed. Hence his frequent laments about not having pressed the matter earlier. In addition to his interest in the Neptune’s cargo and the Hannah, there was another claim identified only as “V—’s” in his correspondence, possibly Volney’s royalties from his English publisher. Finally, Barlow attempted to mediate the rupture that had taken place between Benjamin West and Fulton, who had been omitted from West’s elegant dinner the preceding September.³⁵

Barlow would have been present on May 2 when the High Court of Admiralty finally heard Thayer’s appeal. On May 27, the court awarded half the cargo to Thayer and ordered the British captors to make out a true account of the sales so that restitution could be made within a month. The court reserved the other half of the cargo to the captors.³⁶ The court’s “prize appeals assignations” book suggests the compromise was designed to head off further legal action. On June 30, the court received the required account of the cargo’s value and subsequently ordered payment on July 27.³⁷ What Barlow lost in the judicial compromise he made up by having the captor’s proceeds in selling the wine—rather than the values listed in the invoice—taken as the measure of his restitution. Since most of the critical decisions of the High Court of Admiralty took place after the resumption of war between France and Britain in the middle of May, Barlow was relieved to have the case settled when it was.

Still, the renewal of hostilities adversely affected Barlow in several respects. “The Devil has laid his paw upon the exchanges just as I was ready to remit,” he lamented in connection with two sterling bills he had sent from London to cover a debt due William Lee in France. These bills protected him from the declining value of the franc in London, but because they were due in two and three months, respectively, from the date they were drawn, long after Lee’s debt was due, they had to be discounted in Paris. Barlow expected to pay a big premium as a consequence.³⁸

More significantly, the resumption of the war interfered with Barlow’s attempts to sell his Parisian real estate. At the end of April as the Peace of Amiens was collapsing, Barlow authorized Fulton to accept 160,000 francs for the residence on 50 rue de Vaugirard. When the former émigré owner offered Barlow 25,000 francs for a smaller property he had priced at 50,000, Barlow came down to between 40,000 and 36,000 francs because he expected the renewed war would adversely affect property values as it had the previous decade.³⁹

While Barlow was in London, Livingston and James Monroe, who had arrived in France in early April, managed to acquire Louisiana from France for $11,250,000 in 6 percent stock of the United States. As part of the deal, the United States assumed the claims of U.S. citizens against French spoliations totaling $3,750,000. This sum covered cargoes not paid for, unreasonable detentions by embargoes, and prize cases in which the council of prizes had ordered restitution that had not been made. Any claims arising from captures and confiscations that were still in the process of adjudication, as well as all claims arising after the Franco-American Convention of 1800 had been signed (September 30), were excluded.

After sealing the Louisiana Purchase agreement in Paris, Monroe had crossed the channel to replace Rufus King as U.S. ambassador to Britain. There he encountered Barlow. Though they had not seen each other for eight years, the two men experienced no difficulty renewing their former friendship. From Monroe, Barlow learned of the details of the treaty, which raised the value of the “liquidations” a French Commission had issued certifying the validity of the American claims acknowledged under the Convention of 1800 but not yet provided for. Barlow was speculating in these claims much as he speculated in disputed prizes in Britain. But he was more interested in the long-term strategic implications of the Louisiana Purchase than speculative gain, as can be seen from the long letter he wrote his Yale classmate and fellow Connecticut republican, Alexander Wolcott, expressing his enthusiasm for what Monroe and Livingston had accomplished.⁴⁰

Barlow saw the Louisiana Purchase “not merely as an acquisition of territory, but as removing, perhaps forever, the causes of war and every temptation to deviate from economy & justice and the steady pursuits of sober & well respected industry.” The development was especially welcome now that the task of assuring the survival of revolutionary republicanism had fallen exclusively upon the United States. However, Barlow also realized that the acquisition of Louisiana could perpetuate racial slavery. France’s recent reintroduction of slavery in its colonies heightened his sensitivity to an institution he considered “in every point of view, moral, political & economical” as “the greatest blemish of the American Republic.”

Barlow still had faith in the “gradual advancement and certain triumph” of republicanism and welcomed the emancipation statutes passed by the northern states. “Slavery seems now to be nearly abolished as far south as Maryland. In that state & Virginia it is losing ground daily.” He was confident that “it must certainly languish & expire by degrees” in the Deep South unless “kept in vigour by taking root in the immense regions of the west.” Barlow saw the centrality of expansion in slavery’s future well before many of his fellow countrymen did. He argued vigorously against it less out of consideration for “that race of men who are commonly designated for slaves” than because he thought it was “completely subversive . . . of the very ground on which [the American republic] stand[s].” It would be “impossible . . . to preserve [our] institutions, much less to improve them, under those preposterous habits of feeling, thinking & acting, that slavery in its mildest operation must inspire in the rising generations!” Barlow knew both from the experience of his own family and from his encounter with Algerian slavery what the institution did to the enslavers. “A race of hereditary masters cannot be a race of republicans, of just men.”

Why did Barlow lecture Alexander Wolcott, who could not even deliver a Republican majority in Middletown, Connecticut, on the evils of slavery? Barlow may also have written to other, more influential Americans about excluding slavery from the new territory. Entries in his 1802 notebook record the ratio of slave to free states and a brief discussion of why maple sugar was more conducive to freedom than cane sugar, reflecting his growing preoccupation with the problem. Perhaps Barlow hoped that by stressing the institution’s evils to Wolcott, he could give him an additional weapon with which to challenge the Federalists in Connecticut as well as the expansion of slavery into the West. The Federalists saw the Louisiana Purchase as ensuring their political death because the new territories would remain loyal to their Republican sponsors. But the Federalists also objected to acquiring Louisiana because it would expand slavery. Excluding slavery from Louisiana would deprive them of grounds for opposing the Republic’s expansion.

Toward the end of his stay in London, Barlow received an alarming letter from Fulton about Ruth’s health. Though she had escaped an epidemic that had killed more than ten thousand Parisians the previous winter, Barlow now judged Ruth’s health too precarious to leave Europe. Since he could “not think of leaving her behind,” their departure for America was again delayed.⁴¹ Barlow talked to some of the leading physicians of London about Ruth’s problems and concluded that they might understand their trade better than French physicians did. Napoleon’s announcement that he planned to crown himself emperor removed Barlow’s remaining reservations about leaving France.

During the ensuing year Barlow wound up most of his business affairs in France. He put his rue de Vaugirard mansion under Daniel Parker’s management in the expectation of getting a better price for it when the next peace was concluded. He had no way of knowing that eventuality lay more than a decade in the future. In 1809 Fulton advised Barlow to raise an annuity “for your joint lives . . . upon the Paris property,” suggesting Barlow accept $2,000 a year “if Mr. Parker will secure you.” In the same letter, Fulton referred to a remittance of $35,000 (somewhat more than 600,000 current dollars) that Barlow had received from abroad, presumably from the sale of his other assets in Paris.⁴² None of these strategies came to fruition, though, and the best disposition Parker could make of the rue de Vaugirard property was to have Livingston’s successor, John Armstrong, move there with his legation staff at the end of 1806.⁴³ When the Barlows returned to Paris in 1811, they would reoccupy the mansion.

The Barlows moved to London in November 1804 and spent the winter in Bedford Square. Their departure from France led some to question Barlow’s republican loyalties because he seemed to be following Fulton, who made no attempt to conceal his recent acceptance of a retainer from the British government to develop a submarine after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens. Until then Barlow had assumed that France was the best place for bringing the submarine to fruition because her rivalry with Britain made her Fulton’s logical patron. Barlow had previously collaborated with Fulton in drafting a six-thousand-word memo that survives under the title of “Fulton’s Projected Letter to Pitt.” The memo proposed that Britain peacefully transform herself into a republic to avoid the revolutionary consequences that were bound to attend the destruction of her navy by submarines. It echoed Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders by arguing that the nation as a whole would be vastly enriched by a free commerce unburdened by armaments, while the privileged few would be spared the horrors France had inflicted upon its ruling class.⁴⁴

It is not clear if this memo was ever sent or whether, if sent, it had any effect beyond reinforcing the British ministry’s conviction that Fulton was a mad—and therefore potentially—dangerous genius. Barlow regretted Fulton’s choice of patrons but felt that the French government had mishandled his friend. He also agreed with Fulton’s argument that it wouldn’t make much difference who financed the submarine’s development. Once the technology was perfected, it could be used by weaker naval powers against stronger ones to establish the freedom of the seas. Though Barlow refrained from attacking Napoleon’s regime directly, his defense of Fulton’s continuing loyalty to republicanism was in itself an implicit condemnation. As for his own loyalty to France, Barlow had no trouble sidestepping that question by saying his sole concern was Ruth’s health.

The Barlows had plenty of friends in London, but they stayed out of public sight during the winter of 1805, largely because of Ruth’s health. There were some pleasant evenings at Joseph Johnson’s, and Fulton’s association with the liberal Lord Stanhope—with whom he shared many technical interests—frequently exposed them to his lordship’s company.⁴⁵ Barlow continued to cultivate his friendship with George Erving, and Ruth became acquainted with the celebrated needlework artist and schoolmistress, Mary Linwood, whom the Barlows met through Benjamin West.⁴⁶ None of these friendships were strong enough to keep the Barlows in Europe, however. They had come to the conclusion if they did not return home soon, they never would. Fulton tarried in Britain through 1806 until he came to the conclusion that the British government’s support for his submarine project was no better than Frances’s, but even his staying failed to detain them. In the middle of March 1805, Ruth wrote her Quaker friend Mrs. Rotch—a native of Nantucket, who with her husband had settled in France—that after a month’s sojourn in the West Country near Bath and Bristol they intended to embark for America, her health permitting.⁴⁷

Many considerations reinforced their resolve. In addition to Barlow’s sense that the future of republicanism now lay in America, Jefferson continued to beckon Barlow to make the rout of Federalism permanent by writing the history of its demise.⁴⁸ Abraham Baldwin’s health was declining, and if they waited much longer, none of Ruth’s full siblings would be alive to welcome them. Finally, there were Barlow’s lands, which were unlikely to improve with neglect. He suspected he had already lost to back taxes the Vermont lands he had purchased in 1781, and he didn’t know whether his nephews had accepted his invitation to settle on his Ohio lands. That they might do so inspired Barlow to write Gen. Return Jonathan Meigs, who was agent for the Ohio Company and whose son Return Jonathan Meigs Jr. would soon be elected Ohio’s governor.⁴⁹

The senior Meigs was the older brother of Barlow’s classmate, Josiah Meigs, but Barlow only mentioned that connection as an afterthought. He began his letter by referring to fellow veteran Meigs as “an old revolutionary acquaintance,” asking him to assist his nephews in establishing themselves on his land. One favor, of course, deserved another, so Barlow mentioned that he was collecting “a cabinet of mineralogy” for Josiah and his university. Cashing in on revolutionary loyalties, which could not by this time have been very strongly felt, to secure his claim on a portion of the American West, meant that Barlow had resolved upon a future in America.