CHAPTER FIVE
Literary Recognition
As a childless couple the Barlows faced fewer financial demands than they would have had their marriage been fertile. But at least their unwelcome fate allowed them to serve as the social center for a circle of talented friends despite their constrained circumstances. Noah Webster recorded in his diary frequently dining with the Barlows, who also regularly entertained John Trumbull and Lemuel Hopkins with their wives. They also saw a good deal of Oliver Wolcott Jr. while he remained in Hartford trying to bring some order to Connecticut’s finances.
Not surprisingly, Barlow became a spokesman for the Hartford “Wits.” In a letter to William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey, Barlow claimed to speak for “several Gentlemen of taste in this part of the country” who sought to assemble an anthology of American poetry. He asked Livingston to send him such of his poems “as you are willing should be presented to the public.” Barlow left no doubt about his determination to have them. “Altho’ your Excellency’s character can receive no advantage by being ranked among the Poets of the present age; yet the public will claim an undoubted right to those pieces they have already in possession; & would be farther obliged could you afford them more.”1 Barlow’s circle of “Wits” briefly constituted the poetic vortex of the new nation. They enjoyed the support of Jeremiah Wadsworth, and because Hartford was the state’s capital, talented nonresidents like David Humphreys often came to town to conduct public business.
Humphreys had been Washington’s aide-de-camp during the last years of the war and had served between 1784 and 1786 as secretary of a commission—consisting of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin—charged with negotiating commercial treaties in Europe. When Humphreys returned home in May 1786, he was alarmed by what he found and reported to Jefferson that “our federal concerns are not in a very promising situation. . . . Many people appear to be uneasy & to prognosticate revolutions they hardly know how or why. A scarcity of money is universally complained of” and some of the state legislatures had begun issuing paper money.2 Compounding Humphreys’s general sense of dismay was his fellow citizens’ total indifference to “A Poem on the Happiness of America.” He had written it during 1785 to counter hostile criticism of the new nation in Europe. Though it had been acclaimed abroad, it was being ignored in America.
Seeking wider recognition, Humphreys approached Hudson and Goodwin, publishers of the Connecticut Courant. Though the Courant had not published much poetry since 1783, Humphreys persuaded them to run his “Elegy on the Burning of Fairfield” (1779) on June 19, 1786, and to print the first American edition of “A Poem on the Happiness of America,” a 176-line excerpt of which appeared in the Courant on June 26. Humphrey’s ability to change the Courant’s course testified to his powers of persuasion. Physically large by the standards of any age, he was used to people agreeing with him. But the Courant’s change of heart reflected more than Humphreys’ personal charisma. The Courant’s aversion to the work of local poets had stemmed from the Wits’ failure to address the issues agitating the public in the postwar period. This feature of the their work made Hudson and Goodwin content to have the Mercury serve as their exclusive outlet. Humphreys turned the Courant around by demonstrating the political potential of poetry. He then mobilized Barlow’s circle of Wits to assist in countering the influence in Connecticut of Shays’s Rebellion.
The Massachusetts insurgency had been ignited by the direct tax in hard money the legislature had levied in response to a congressional requisition to protect the Republic’s foreign credit. During the last half of 1786, insurgents obstructed the courts from seizing property for the payment of private and public debts, protesting that forced sales were fetching only a fraction of the assets’ value because of the general shortage of money. When the Massachusetts legislature authorized a military force to suppress the insurgency, the insurgents attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Springfield. Several lives were lost in the assault, after which the rebels retreated toward Peterborough. In late January 1787, an army under Benjamin Lincoln’s command caught up with the rebels in the midst of a blizzard and dispersed them. But when the people of Massachusetts next went to the polls, they elected a general court sympathetic to the insurgents.
Many found this as disturbing as armed insurrection. The election following the uprising suggested that the American people were either unwilling or unable to pay their revolutionary debts. Connecticut’s legislature had avoided rebellion by refusing compliance with Congress’ requisitions, but Humphreys felt inaction compromised the Confederation’s government as much as Shays’s followers had. When Humphreys appealed to Hartford’s poets for assistance, Barlow readily responded because The Vision of Columbus depended upon the success of the Revolution. If the nation dissolved in response to insurgencies like Shays’s, the glorious future that Barlow’s epic assumed would vanish.
Alexander Pope had popularized the satiric epic in Britain, and John Trumbull’s “The Progress of Dullness” and M’Fingal naturalized it in America. M’Fingal alluded to James MacPherson’s forgery of an ancient epic “Fingal,” allegedly written by a third-century Gaelic bard named Ossian. MacPherson’s forgery appeared in London and Dublin in 1762 and subsequently attracted considerable attention on the Continent, where it helped shape the sensibility of the emerging Romantic movement. Samuel Johnson eventually questioned Ossian’s authenticity, setting off a prolonged controversy within British literary circles. The attention Ossian had attracted persuaded Humphreys and his collaborators in The Anarchiad that fictional documents purportedly from an ancient civilization would lend themselves to effective satire.
Much speculation has developed over who contributed what to The Anarchiad. Aside from the authorship of Number V, “The Genius of America,” which Humphreys subsequently claimed, the issue of authorship cannot be resolved. The Wits could have made claims similar to Humphreys had they wished, and their reticence about authorship suggests they regarded The Anarchiad as a group effort. The subsequent attempt of Elihu Hubbard Smith to maximize Lemuel Hopkins’s role in the enterprise at Barlow’s expense occurred after Barlow’s republicanism turned the state’s Federalists against him.3 No independent evidence supports Smith’s attributions, and Humphreys failed even to mention Hopkins when describing the participants to Washington.
No one disputes that Humphreys acted as the impresario of the project. After being elected to the autumn general assembly, he visited Hartford before the legislature met and subsequently carried the first number of the Anarchiad back to New Haven. It appeared in the New Haven Gazette of October 26, 1786, under the title of “American Antiquities.” During the next four months, Humphreys returned to Hartford several times on official business, on each occasion reenergizing the Wits to continue their project.
This first number of The Anarchiad contained more prose than verse to explain the poem’s controlling conceit. An antiquarian had discovered an ancient manuscript of a twenty-four-book epic entitled “THE ANARCHIAD, A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and substantial Night” while excavating a ruin “in the Western country.” The antiquarian was so struck by the “sublimity of [its] sentiments” that he concluded it “ha[d] been the model of all subsequent epic productions.” By way of proof, he offered a sample from Book Eight that was entitled the “Book of Vision.” This selection also demonstrated the ancient bard’s prophetic powers. It was as if the poet had “taken for the point of vision one of the lofty mountains of America” and caused “the years of futurity to pass before him.” There “the scenes of fate unroll, / And Massachusetts opens on my soul; / There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway; / And mobs in myriads blacken all the way.”4
The next week a second number, dealing with Connecticut, appeared. It consisted of an excerpt from a speech delivered by Anarch to Beelzebub, “for the purpose of persuading him to come over and help his faithful friends in our Macedonia [Connecticut], since his affairs were in so thriving a posture in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.” The speech referred in code to members of the Connecticut legislature who had opposed “a compliance with the requisitions of Congress.” They were accused of favoring a resolution “that we will not pay interest on our foreign or domestic debts—that we should furnish nothing for the support of the federal government—that we should withdraw ourselves from the Union—that all government should be prostrated in the dust—that mobs, conventions, and anarchy should prevail,” or in other words, “that THE GLORIOUS TEMPLE OF LIBERTY and happiness which had been erected in these ends of the earth, for an asylum to suffering humanity, should soon be dissolved.”5 In this way the Wits equated the Shaysites and their allies with the repudiation of everything the Revolution stood for.
Number III of The Anarchiad, appearing at the end of December, took aim at the misdeeds of Rhode Island. The state had recently issued paper money and had passed a law that allowed debtors to retire their obligations to creditors in depreciated bills simply by depositing the nominal value of the debt with a justice of the peace. Debtors had only to publish the creditor’s name and a notice that the debt had been paid to extinguish it legally. The antiquarian thought the Anarchiad’s treatment of paper money a “very poetical digression” because “in an unfunded and depreciating condition, [it] is happily calculated to introduce the long expected scenes of misrule, dishonesty, and perdition.”6 As Anarch concluded,
Each weekly print new lists of cheats proclaims,
Proud to enroll their knav’ries and their names;
literary recognition 83 The wiser race, the shares of law to shun,
Like Lot from Sodom, from Rhode Island run.
The antiquarian promised to collect the names of all those who had taken advantage of the Rhode Island law so that “whenever the army shall be raised for the support of anarchy, or whenever that new state . . . the State of Confusion shall be properly organized, and admitted into the confederacy,” people would know to whom they were indebted for their blessings.7
By the time Number IV came out in January 1787, the public had become sufficiently familiar with The Anarchiad’s controlling conceit so that nothing more than the heading “Extract from the Anarchiad, Book XXXIII” introduced eighty-five lines of verse. They invidiously compared the “Western world” with Britain, so far as honoring national debts went, and lamented that Washington’s retirement and Nathaniel Greene’s recent death had left the Anarch in undisputed control until challenged by “Great Hesper.” A figure in Greek mythology who achieved apotheosis as the evening star, Hesper would figure prominently in Barlow’s The Columbiad, which appeared twenty years after The Vision of Columbus. Barlow may not have been personally responsible for inserting Hesper in The Anarchiad. But having employed the poetic device of a supernatural agent in The Vision of Columbus, he would have approved the use of the same device in The Anarchiad.
Number V of The Anarchiad consisted of Humphreys’s six-stanza hymn entitled “The Genius of America.” Its appearance coincided with the repulse of Shays’s followers at the Springfield arsenal and the arrival of Lincoln at the head of an army of 2,500. Humphreys was the officer commanding the Connecticut troops that Congress had requisitioned to help suppress the rebellion, so he had designated Hartford as their rendezvous. Though he did not receive marching orders until the middle of February, he probably regarded this contribution to The Anarchiad as a farewell to the project. When it resumed in the last week of February, the rebels had been routed and the worst of the crisis had passed.
Still, Shays’s followers presented a political threat within Massachusetts and in its neighboring states, where they had many sympathizers. That is why successive numbers of The Anarchiad ridiculed the Connecticut politicians, whom the Wits claimed were of the same ilk as Shays and his followers, for resisting efforts to strengthen the federal government. Thus Number VI assaulted “Wronghead” (James Wadsworth of Durham), who was made to lament that:
Those congregated sages, who, ere now,
Had I my wish, were doom’d to guide the plow,
Are planning, still, to build a fed’ral name,
And blast my laurels with eternal shame.8
Anarch urges Wronghead on but has to confess that all his plans for sowing chaos and injustice “can scarce survive the year” unless
The lamp of science [has been] quench’d in night,
Till none, or next to none, can read or write;
The press, anon, in brazen chains must groan,
First watch’d and guarded by our saints alone;
The numerous schools that live along the shore,
Must fall, successive, and must rise no more;
The wits be hang’d; the Congress forc’d to flee
To western wilds, or headlong to the sea.9
Wronghead was again the butt of Number VII, which was cast as a eulogium delivered by Tweedle, a fictional protégé of Copper (Joseph Hopkins), to celebrate Wronghead’s ability to “see farthest into total darkness.” Anarch rewards Wronghead with “a pair of spectacles, which showed every object inverted, and wrapped in a mist of darkness.”10 In a similar vein, Number VIII purported to be a eulogy at the execution of “William Wimble” (William Williams), who advocated sacrificing federal creditors to the interests of the state’s creditors. Number XI, which appeared on August 16 after a twelve-week interval, parodied Dante’s Divine Comedy, its hell being populated by all the leaders of Connecticut’s anti-federal opposition. By the time the last number of The Anarchiad appeared in mid-September, those who favored strengthening the federal government in Connecticut were sufficiently in the ascendant so that the Wits could turn to a new subject, America’s cultural adequacy.
Sometime during the late autumn of 1786 Barlow learned that the King of France had consented to having The Vision of Columbus dedicated to him. With the final obstacle to publication removed, Hudson and Goodwin started advertising for additional subscribers on January 1, 1787: “It will be bound, gilt, and lettered by an Artist equal to any in America, and perhaps not inferior to any workman in London,” while the price would not “be higher than imported Books of this size have commonly borne in America.” The poem was printed in March, and Barlow started distributing it in April. But most of the 750 subscribers received their copies in May as the constitutional convention, representing every state in the Confederation but Rhode Island, assembled in Philadelphia. At the end of October, Hudson and Goodwin advertised a second printing. When it appeared, it listed an additional 177 subscribers, together with 37 who had subscribed to the first edition too late to have their names appear in it.
Anyone confronting the poem’s 2,570 rhymed couplets knew that fortitude would be required to get through the work, especially as the early portions offered little encouragement to the faint-hearted. But Barlow’s introductory essay on the life of Columbus was engagingly written. While he admitted that the poem contained a minor anachronism in having Isabelle die before Columbus returned from his fourth voyage, Barlow failed to acknowledge how the controlling conceit of the poem, which has Columbus liberated from a prison in which he has been unjustly placed by an ungrateful Ferdinand, distorted the record. The anguish of Columbus’s last years derived from his failure to secure the extravagant credit he thought his due. Barlow sacrificed accuracy to create a contrast between an undeserved neglect and the glorious results of Columbus’s discoveries.
Barlow almost forfeited the benefit of this contrast by devoting so much of Books I and II to a description of the American continent and its inhabitants prior to the “discovery.” Since Barlow had little firsthand knowledge of most of the geography and limited access to accounts of the first encounters between the Europeans and Amerindians, his descriptions are impressionistic at best and resemble a geography lesson more than a drama. Barlow does not get around to engaging the interest of ordinary readers until almost the end of Book II, when he has Columbus ask his angelic escort about the origins of the physical and cultural differences in the human family. Are the obvious divergences between Europeans and American Indians to be attributed to separate creations or some other cause?
The angel replies that there are many reasons for the differences, including climate, physical environment, and local, historically specific circumstances, but that the human family still derives from one source. To the question of how the Americas became populated, the angel answers that it happened by seaborne migrations from Europe and Asia. This explanation diminishes Columbus’s role as “discoverer,” but the explorer doesn’t seem to mind because the angel beguiles him with the achievements of two native cultures, the Aztecs and the Incas. The Aztecs, as personified by Montezuma, are portrayed as the tragic victims of Spanish aggression. Though Columbus is saddened upon learning of the sufferings of the Mexican people, the angel bids Columbus not to despond:
Enough for man, with persevering mind,
To act his part and strive to bless mankind;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nor think no blessings shall thy toils attend,
Or these fell tyrants can defeat their end.
Such impious deeds, in Heaven’s all-ruling plan,
Lead in disguise the noblest bliss of man. (II, 355–56, 363–66)
The angel then invites Columbus to contemplate the Inca Empire as exemplifying a society built on human creativity comparable to Columbus’s.
Book III tells the story of the legendary founders of that empire, Capac and Oella. Epics customarily contain a long digression, and Barlow prefaces this Book with a fifteen-page prose “Dissertation On the Genius and Institutions of Manco Capac.” The dissertation claims that “the [constitutional] system of Capac” is “the most surprising exertion of human genius to be found in the history of mankind.”11 Barlow supports his contention by comparing the establishment of the Inca Empire with the achievements of Moses, Lycurgus, Mahomet, and Peter the Great, all of whom had introduced hitherto barbarous peoples to civilization. Barlow measures the achievements of each against three criteria: “First, that his system be such as is capable of reducing the greatest number of men under one jurisdiction. Secondly, that it apply to such principles of human nature for its support, as are universal and permanent.” And “[t]hirdly, that it admit of improvements correspondent to any advancement in knowledge or variation of circumstances, that may happen to its subjects.”12 Capac won the competition because of his success in “drawing together” a barbarous, savage people and developing a “plan of policy, capable of founding and regulating an extensive empire; wisely calculated for perpetual duration; and expressly designed to improve the knowledge, peace and happiness of a considerable portion of mankind.”13
Capac’s “humane ideas of religion” also impressed Barlow. He marvels that “a savage native of the southern wilds of America . . . void of every trace of learning and refinement, . . . [had] acquir[ed] by the mere efforts of reason, a sublime and rational idea of the Parent of the universe!” He credits Capac with instituting an injunction against human sacrifice and a prohibition against beginning “an offensive war with their savage neighbours.” Barlow thought the Inca had made war with the sole objective of civilizing rather than extirpating their adversaries. “The conquered tribes and those taken captive were adopted into the nation; and, by blending with the conquerors, forgot their former rage and ferocity.”14 Barlow covers himself against being charged with Deism by noting that Capac’s “just ideas” about religion had come only as close as “the unenlightened efforts of human wisdom” could in perceiving “the nature and attributes of the Deity.”15
Inserting a fifteen-page dissertation at the beginning of Book III provided readers with a contrast between Barlow’s prose and his poetry. Modern readers will be tempted to ignore the problem and dismiss the dissertation because of the dubious quality of Barlow’s history. His image of the Inca empire is rosier than any modern scholar would paint and is derived largely from Paul Rycaut’s translation of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Inca (London, 1688), which Barlow had seen in Yale’s library.16 The accuracy of the information, however, is less important than what Barlow’s dissertation purports to accomplish. As an essay in comparative civilizations, it develops a well-argued thesis in fifteen pages that the succeeding thirty-one pages of verse fail to match.
Not that Book III lacks drama. It tells of Capac’s son, Rocha, being taken captive by fierce savages on the fringe of the Inca Empire, to whom Rocha was bringing peace and civilization. They want to sacrifice Rocha to placate their gods. The savages almost succeed because the Sun withdraws its power from Capac and his followers until they seek guidance in the Sun’s temple. Barlow’s fantastic account resembles Homer’s epics where heroes like Achilles and Odysseus are temporal pawns of the gods on Mount Olympus. Relying on the conventions of the Greek epics addressed another problem upon which Barlow felt the reputation of his poem depended. He wanted to be taken seriously in Europe and hoped to encourage the idea that an American epic could be as good as a European one. In the same vein he sought to present Capac as the superior of his Old World counterparts. In his victory speech Capac addresses the dying leader of the savages, Zamor, “with soft pity”:
Too long, dread prince, thy raging arms withstood
The hosts of heaven, and braved the avenging God;
His sovereign will commands all strife to cease,
His realm is concord, and his pleasure peace;
This copious carnage, spreading all the plain,
Insults his bounties, but confirms his reign. (III, 823–28)
Barlow hoped a European audience would find moral qualities in this speech that would compel their respect if not emulation.
Books IV, V, and VI of The Vision of Columbus abandon historical fantasy for a panoramic view of Europe’s development before the American Revolution. The trajectory traced by Columbus’s angelic guide is not devoid of horrors, but they prove to be transitory obstructions on the road to enlightenment. Thus the greed that the discovery of gold in the New World spawned among the first Europeans eventually serves as a liberating agent. The new prosperity it generates leads to the Renaissance and Reformation, whose great deeds were “Call’d into life and first inspired by” Columbus (IV, 259).
Barlow’s focus on Europe’s subsequent relationship to the New World, particularly North America, leads him to celebrate the achievements of the early English colonizers. He argues that North America was blessed by the absence of precious metals because that enabled it to avoid the crimes against the native inhabitants that Latin America witnessed. In a convenient fit of historical amnesia, he has the angel declare:
Nor think the native tribes, these wilds that trace,
A foe shall find in this exalted race;
In souls like theirs, no mean, no ungenerous aim
Can shade their glories with the deeds of shame. (IV, 407–10)
North America, peopled by Europeans fleeing “eastern tyrants,” offered the natives “leagues of peace” (IV, 415, 417) and would
Pay the just purchase for the uncultured shore,
Diffuse their arts and share the friendly power:
While the dark tribes in social aid combine,
Exchange their treasures and their joys refine. (IV, 419–22)
A glorious destiny awaited “the western shore” (IV, 445) that eventually would lead to the political redemption of mankind when the “arts and laws, in one great system bind, / By leagues of peace, the labours of mankind” (IV, 471–72).
Such a view of the colonization of North America today seems preposterous. Nor does it help the modern reader that the panorama the angel presents to Columbus fails to observe the chronology of the events mentioned. But Barlow was more interested in presenting the American people with a vision of what he hoped their destiny would be than with an accurate description of the past. And he does not entirely exclude the struggle that took place for North America between the Europeans and the Indians. Book V treats “the savage tribes of foes” (48) that the English confronted. But there was never a doubt about how this contest would be resolved nor about whether, once the Indian threat had been subdued, the culture of the European settlers would prosper and expand.
The struggle between France and Britain commanded more of Barlow’s attention because the Seven Years War allowed him to introduce the other great hero of his poem, George Washington.
Thy greatest son, in that young martial frame,
From yon lost field begins a life of fame.
Tis he, in future strife and darker days,
Desponding states to sovereign rule shall raise,
When weak empire, in his arm, shall find
The sword, the shield, the bulwark of mankind. (V, 249–54)
Barlow makes no attempt to explain the issues that lay behind the Revolution. However, he leaves the reader in no doubt that more was at stake than the defense of the colonists’ property and their families from the ravages of the enemy. He assumes that his audience is so familiar with what had driven the revolutionary crisis that there is no need to describe it.
The same approach governs his handling of the events of the Revolutionary War. It is rendered as a spectacle in which most of the defeats are passed over, unless they serve—as in Richard Montgomery’s case or in Lincoln’s surrender of Charleston—to define a hero’s fame. The most distinctive aspect of Barlow’s account is Louis XVI’s place in it. The “Great Louis” (V, 5) acts like a Greek god whose attention is caught by what is happening in North America:
Each virtuous deed, each new illustrious name,
Wakes in his soul the living light of fame.
He sees the liberal, universal cause,
That wondering worlds in still attention draws. (VI, 9–12)
After deciding to intervene in the American war, Louis proclaims France’s disinterest in American possessions. He acts instead in response to
. . . Virtue struggling with the vengeful Power,
That stains yon fields and desolates that shore,
With nature’s foe bids former compacts cease:
We war reluctant, and our wish is peace;
To suffering nations be the succour given,
The cause of nations is the cause of Heaven. (VI, 59–64)
To which the rest of Europe, with the exception of Britain, responds:
. . . in glad amaze,
Gaze on the scene and brighten as they gaze;
Wake to new life, assume a borrow’d name,
Enlarge the luster and partake the fame. (VI, 129–34)
That no European state ever did or ever would act in such a fashion bothered Barlow not at all. His quest was for the sublime rather than the realistic, and he made Washington into the embodiment of that sublime. Barlow has Columbus witness Washington at Yorktown acting the same way that Capac had previously acted towards his vanquished enemy, Zacor.
The conclusion of the war provided Barlow with the chance to present a glorious view of the future that the American Revolution had made possible. America was to emerge as the granary of the world, and a newly prosperous land would provide the arts and sciences with a chance to flourish as never before. These were themes Barlow had developed in The Prospect of Peace and in his 1781 commencement poem. But in this iteration, Barlow could not resist enumerating the cultural contributions America had already made. After noting the new nation’s one scientific luminary, Benjamin Franklin, however, Barlow was left looking at a largely empty cupboard. He had more material to work with in the arts, but the best American painters of his generation, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, had both pursued careers in Britain. Barlow showed some critical awareness of their significance, but the only painter with an American career he might have heard of at this point was Charles Willson Peale. He is not mentioned, though Gilbert Stuart—yet to return from studying in Britain—is. Poetry offered a richer field, but only John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, and Humphreys are mentioned.
Barlow’s catalogue of American luminaries is followed by a digression on the nation’s religion in which the diversity of sects is represented as an unqualified asset. Nonetheless, he realized that if he did not acknowledge that their “sacred task” had something to do with human salvation, he risked giving the impression that he valued religion only for its social instrumentality. He solved the problem by treating Columbus to an audience with the deity in which “the Lord of Life” (VII, 193) explains his creation and his promise of redemption:
. . . hear, ye sons of earth,
Rise into life, behold the promised birth;
From pain to joy, from guilt to glory rise,
Be babes on earth, be seraphs in the skies.
Lo, to the cries of grief mild mercy bends,
Stern vengeance softens and the God descends,
The atoning God, the pardoning grace to seal,
The dead to quicken and the sick to heal. (VII, 213–20)
While the view of salvation presented to Columbus may not be that of orthodox Congregationalism, it is recognizably Christian. By bestowing divine sanction on the drama of history, Barlow prepares the way for the even more glorious future outlined in Book IX of the epic.
Before pursuing that lead, Barlow, tackles another problem implicit in his fusion of the sacred and profane. Columbus asks his “Kind messenger of Heaven . . . Why this progressive labouring search of man?” (VIII, 11–12)
Why did not Heaven, with one unclouded ray,
All human arts and reason’s powers display?
That mad opinions, sects and party strife
Might find no place t’imbitter human life. (VIII, 17–20)
The angel replies that “the counsels of th’ unchanging Mind, / Thro’ nature’s range, progressive paths design’d” (VIII, 25–26). Did not progress govern the creation as well as the early prophetic hints about the “filial Godhead” (VIII, 48) assuming human form? It also governed the development of the “fair Science, of celestial birth” (theology, VIII, 53) in its attempt “By gradual steps to mark the extended road, / That leads mankind to reason and to God” (VIII, 55–56). Similarly, progress has described the evolution of human society from savagery to civilization, from civilization to empire—including feudalism, and from feudalism to the Renaissance. “Blest Science,” until then confined by conquest and enslavement, now “Taught milder arts the peaceful prize to yield” (VIII, 207). As a consequence, “A happier morn now brightens in the skies, / Superior arts, in peaceful glory, rise” (VIII, 215–16).
The angel promises Columbus that this new state of affairs will lead to the progressive expansion of the human mind and a new order where “Contending kings their views harmonious blend, / With temper’d force their arts and arms extend” (VIII, 235–36). Columbus is not entirely convinced, given what he knows about human nature, and asks the angel for reassurance: “Say, what connecting chain, in endless line, / Links earth to heaven, and mortal with divine?” (VIII, 293–94). While the angel acknowledges that reason by itself can be perverted in the service of passion, it argues that God has endowed man with resources to find his way out of the potential morass:
Of human powers, the Senses always chief,
Produce instruction or inforce belief;
Reason, as next in sway, the balance bears,
Receives their tidings, and with skill compares,
Restrains wild fancy, calms the impassion’d soul,
Illumes the judgment and refines the whole. (VIII, 403–08)
Since “all nations” (VIII, 426) and all languages refer to God, “What cause mysterious could the thought impart, / Not taught by nature nor acquired by art?” (VIII, 429–30). Though heaven and earth may have to wait, eventually they will be reconciled. This was the answer Augustine had given to a similar question twelve centuries before, and with it Barlow planted himself firmly in the mainstream of the Christian tradition.
Having charted his philosophical course, Barlow turns to a vision of a future that embraces the whole world. The engine driving “the same progressive plan, / That draws, for mutual succor, man to man” (IX, 45–46) is the same one behind his commencement poem of 1781: commerce. Cooperation and brotherhood will take the place formerly occupied by competition and strife among nations and in the process improve human nature. Similarly, diversity will lead to universal harmony, and “the tongues of nations, here, harmonious blend, / Till one pure language thro’ the earth extend” (IX, 253–54). Barlow even sees a divine plan working through “the unconscious steps of human kind” (IX, 276) to construct one earthly government “To hear and give the counsels of mankind” (IX, 428).
Line 68 of Book IX refers the reader to a three-page footnote, which argues that events since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War have confirmed his optimistic predictions. Barlow asserts that the “state of peace and happiness as is foretold in scripture and commonly called the millennial period, may be rationally expected to be introduced without a miracle.” He acknowledges that the course of improvement in history to date has “been slow and often interrupted.” But he is encouraged because “the causes of these interruptions” appear to be “designed” by “Providence” to be “accelerating the same events, which they seemed for awhile to retard.” Barlow argues that mankind had been closer to achieving “universal civilization” at the time of Charlemagne than at the time of Augustus because by then Europe was divided into enough states to prevent tyrants like Caesar or Alexander from emerging.17
Barlow thought three preconditions were necessary for “civilizing the world.” First, all its parts had to be inhabited. Second, the different nations had to be aware of each other. Third, they had to trade with each other. “The spirit of commerce is happily calculated by the Author of wisdom to open an amicable intercourse between all countries, to soften the horrors of war, to enlarge the field of science and speculation, and to assimilate the manners, feelings and languages of all nations.” Thus the key to the general improvement of mankind lay in “Geography, Navigation and Commerce,” but the most important of these was commerce. It would “produce a thousand advantages in . . . government and legislation, give Patriotism the air of Philanthropy, induce all men to regard each other as brethren and friends, eradicate all kinds of literary, religious, and political superstition, prepare the minds of all mankind for the rational reception of moral and religious truth, and finally evince that such a system of Providence, as appears in the unfolding of these events, is the best possible system to produce the happiness of creatures.”18 A footnote in prose says what was on his mind better than 460 lines of his verse.
The Vision of Columbus received only passing notice in the American press and then not until more than a year after its publication. It was first referenced in other literary works. One of the characters in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), which is credited with being the first American novel, reported having read Barlow’s poem. It also drew some hostile comments. Peter Markoe alluded to The Vision of Columbus in his doggerel The Times (Philadelphia, 1788), describing Barlow as a poet “Who drowsily pursues his drowsy theme, / And to the gallant chief ascribes his dream, / Thick mists of dullness on his readers fall, / Who sleep so soundly—they ne’er dream at all.”19 But none of the limited commentary took notice of Barlow’s potentially contentious footnote in Book IX.
The most extensive and judicious assessment of The Vision of Columbus appeared in an essay published by the Mercury comparing Barlow’s epic with Dwight’s. While the author of this piece thought “both excellent,” he was harder on Barlow than Dwight. Nonetheless, he acknowledged “that the deficiencies in Mr. Barlow’s poem, if deficiencies there are any, are [not] to be imputed to any want of genius, or poetical powers, but rather to the nature of his subject.” He also felt Barlow had “discovered such a fund of taste; invention and poetical enthusiasm” in The Vision of Columbus “as gives us reason to expect . . . if he continues to cultivate and improve his poetical talents, [he will] be able to produce something equal, if not superior, to anything written in the English language.” Finally, after favorably noting Trumbull’s M’Fingal, this critic concluded that “I think there ought not and cannot be any rivalship between three American poets; because they all have their peculiar excellencies, such as do not eclipse the excellencies of each other.”20
The Vision of Columbus drew more attention from critics in Britain. Barlow had sent Richard Price a copy of his poem in 1786 with a letter requesting his advice about publishing it in England. The passages lauding Louis XVI and condemning Britain led Price to counsel against the attempt. But Barlow revised the poem shortly after it was published in America, and an English edition appeared in October 1787, inspiring an unnamed writer in the Critical Review to complement Barlow on his choice of subject and design. He congratulated Barlow on abstaining “from all illiberal abuse of the British army” and favorably noted the “many philosophical disquisitions” contained in the poem on such a variety of subjects as “the dissimilarities among nations . . . the peopling of America . . . the progress of the arts and sciences.” Still, his praise was guarded. “So daring a muse as his must sometimes be expected to veil her head in the clouds.” He went on to say “that subjects so extensive and arduous should not always be accurately investigated, that several faulty passages might be selected from a poem of such magnitude . . . ought not to detract from its general merit. Mr. Barlow thinks with freedom and expresses himself with spirit.”21 The two other London reviews were shorter and less effusive, but assuming Barlow’s objective was to be taken seriously in Europe, there can be no doubt that he had succeeded.
On the strength of his Vision of Columbus and his role in coauthoring The Anarchiad, Barlow was invited to give the July Fourth oration to the Connecticut chapter of the Cincinnati at Hartford. He used the occasion to promote the Federalist program of strengthening the central government. Like many during the summer of 1787, he hoped that major changes would issue from the constitutional convention meeting in Philadelphia and the Oration articulated the same visionary republicanism that infused The Vision of Columbus.22 The American Revolution was the product of “reason” and “clear understanding,” albeit assisted by the favorable circumstance that Americans were “habituated to liberty,” living as they did in a thinly settled “extensive territory” and possessed of “a mild and benevolent religion” (4–5). These ingredients had contributed to the emergence of a society able to react to the threat of British tyranny and oppression before feeling its full force. “It was not the quantity of the tax, it was not the mode of appropriation, but it was the right of the demand, which was called in question.” Even then the continent had spent a decade debating the matter “before they assumed the sword.” The “peculiar glory” of the American Revolution lay in “sober reason and reflection” rather than blind enthusiasm. “What other age or nation has reasoned before they felt, and from the dictates of duty and conscience, encountered dangers, distress and poverty, for the sake of securing to posterity a government of independence and peace?” Thus had Americans set a liberating example for millions in “unborn nations” (5–6).
However, the Revolution was only “half completed. Independence and Government were the two objects contended for, and but one is yet obtained. . . . Could the same generous principles, the same wisdom and unanimity be exerted in effecting the establishment of a permanent foederal system, what an additional lustre would it pour upon the present age!” Barlow warned that “without an efficient government our Independence will cease to be a blessing,” negating the sacrifices that all had made, but especially those of the Revolution’s fallen heroes (8). The current “crisis” was “the most alarming that America ever saw.” Though Americans had “contended with the most powerful nation and subdued the bravest and best appointed armies,” they had now “to contend with [themselves], and encounter passions and prejudices more powerful than armies and more dangerous to our peace” (11). Barlow saw the Philadelphia convention as holding the key to the future. “If there were ever a time, in any age or nation, when the fate of millions depended upon the voice of one, it is in the present period of these states. Every free citizen of the American Empire ought now to conduct himself as the legislator of half mankind.” How Americans responded to the crisis would “entail happiness or misery upon a larger portion of human beings, than could be affected by the conduct of all the nations of Europe united” (12, 13).
Barlow did not assume all voices should be equal in producing the happy result he sought. Instead, he celebrated the patriotic examples set by prominent Cincinnati members who had recently died, especially Nathaniel Greene, and called on his fellow countrymen to give those lives additional meaning by supporting the work of the federal convention. At this point Barlow would go no further in the direction of democracy than to assert that “the majority of a great people, on a subject which they understand, will never act wrong” (12). Americans when properly informed would understand that “the present is an age of philosophy; and America, the empire of reason,” and that “our duty calls us to act worthy of the age and the country which gave us birth” (19). “Under the idea of a permanent and happy government,” which he expected the federal convention to propose, Barlow predicted the advent of a boundless prosperity coupled with a “rapid improvement in all the arts that embellish human nature.” He was confident that “the example of political wisdom and felicity here to be displayed will excite emulation through the kingdoms of the earth, and meliorate the condition of the human race.” Though Barlow did not quite promise the redemption of mankind, he saw a chance for America to become the agent that would promote “peace . . . through the extended world” (19, 20). His Fourth of July oration presented as sublime a vision as any he had described in the 5,140 lines of The Vision of Columbus and was considerably more accessible.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Buy This Book in Print