[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 83 (Tuesday, June 23, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6913-S6914]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   JOEL BARLOW, DIPLOMAT AND PATRIOT

 Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to honor one of America's 
earliest diplomats and a distinguished native of Connecticut, Joel 
Barlow. On June 28, in a modest ceremony, a bronze biographical tablet 
will be dedicated to Barlow in the churchyard of the tiny village of 
Zarnowiec, Poland, where Barlow died and was laid to rest in 1812. The 
event is organized and the tablet donated by the Joel Barlow Memorial 
Fund, in cooperation with the American Center of Polish Culture and 
DACOR, Diplomatic and Consular Officers Retired (of the U.S. State 
Department).
  Joel Barlow was born in 1754 and raised in Redding, Connecticut. His 
ancestors were among the earliest settlers of the region. After 
graduating from Yale University in 1778, he took an additional Divinity 
course and joined George Washington's army as a chaplain, serving for 
three years until the end of the Revolution. He slipped home from his 
army duties long enough to marry Ruth Baldwin, the sister of a Yale 
classmate. They married in secret because of her father's initial 
objection.
  At the close of the war in 1782, the couple moved to Hartford, where 
Barlow helped publish the magazine ``American Mercury,'' writing 
political pamphlets, satires, and poetry. He was one of a group of 
satirical writers, mostly Yale men, known as the ``Hartford Wits.'' At 
that time, he also completed and published the first version of his 
American verse epic, ``The Vision of Columbus.'' It is said that in 
this work, he was the first writer in English

[[Page S6914]]

to use the words ``civil,'' ``civic,'' and ``civilization'' in their 
modern senses. He also envisioned a future international council very 
much like today's United Nations, dedicated to peacekeeping, cultural 
exchange, and development of the arts.
  In 1786, Barlow studied law and was admitted to the Bar. He worked as 
a promoter for the Scioto Land Company. In 1788, Barlow went to Paris 
to promote the sale of the Scioto Land, a huge tract of Ohio wilderness 
opened by the government for settlement, to European emigrants. A large 
group of bourgeois French refugees traveled to Ohio to settle in the 
land, but the American promoters had not made any preparations for 
their reception, and they met terrible privations in the wilderness. By 
the time Ruth joined her husband in Paris in 1790, American organizers 
of the Scioto company were exposed as profiteering frauds; Barlow, 
however, was proven innocent. The colony, called Gallipolis, survived 
despite the hardships, but Barlow's reputation with his countrymen had 
been seriously damaged.
  Barlow was in Paris during the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. 
He was a friend of Thomas Paine and other Revolutionary sympathizers, 
English and American. He wrote his major tract ``Advice to the 
Privileged Orders'' and his verse-satire ``The Conspiracy of Kings'' in 
London, where he and Ruth had gone to avoid the Jacobin disorders. The 
``Advice'' so offended the British government that it banned the book 
and tried to arrest Barlow, who fled into hiding in Paris. His ``Letter 
to the National Convention of France,'' a proposal for a new French 
constitution, so impressed the Assembly delegates that in 1792, they 
made him an honorary citizen of the new Republic, an honor he shared 
with Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Paine. In the final throes of 
the Terror, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793, 
Barlow was in southeast France helping organize the Savoy, newly 
captured from Italy, as a political division of the new Republic.
  Fluent in French, sympathetic to the Republic, and successful in 
business, the Barlows were popular with the reformers and 
intelligentsia, as well as such scientific innovators as the balloonist 
Montgolfier. They were also close to Robert Fulton, who arrived in 
France in 1797, and worked for some years on prototypes of his 
steamboat, torpedo boat, and other engineering projects. Fulton later 
did the illustrations for a large, handsome second version of Barlow's 
epic, heavily revised and retitled ``The Columbiad,'' published in 
Philadelphia in 1807.
  In 1796, during Washington's second term, Barlow resolved our first 
hostage crisis. He was sent to Algiers as consul to help with 
implementation of our peace treaty with that state and to secure the 
release of over one hundred American seamen, some of whom had been held 
captive by Algerian corsairs since 1785. This required great patience 
and diplomatic skill on his part, not to mention payment of substantial 
sums to local officials, but he succeeded where others had failed. He 
stayed on as consul for a year after the hostages were freed before 
returning to Paris in 1797.
  After 18 years abroad, the Barlows returned to America in 1805, 
hoping to spend the rest of their lives at home. Thomas Jefferson 
wanted Barlow to write an American history, and in 1807, at Jefferson's 
urging, the Barlows moved to a house and small estate in Washington 
that Barlow named Kalorama, ``beautiful view'' in Greek. However, in 
1811, President James Madison appointed Barlow as Minister to France. 
His task was to negotiate for compensation for French damages to 
American shipping and to make a trade treaty. Reluctant, but always 
ready to serve his country, Barlow took his wife, as well as his nephew 
Thomas as secretary, and returned to France in 1811. Once there, 
however, Barlow met nothing but delays because of Napoleon's wars in 
Europe.
  Finally, the Emperor, engaged in a winter campaign against Russia, 
summoned Barlow to meet with him in Poland, in Wilna (now Vilnius). But 
the French armies were utterly defeated by the Russians and the winter. 
Napoleon fled south, ignoring his appointment. With Thomas, his staff, 
and other diplomats, Barlow fled through the freezing weather toward 
Germany to escape the pursuing Cossacks, missing Napoleon, who hurried 
straight to France. Barlow died of pneumonia in Zarnowiec, between 
Warsaw and Krakow, on December 24, 1812. (There is a disagreement about 
the date; the existing church tablet in Poland gives it as December 
26.) It took his nephew more than two weeks to bring news of his death 
to Ruth in Paris, and it was three months before the news reached 
America. Joel Barlow was mourned widely in France, but back at home, 
President Madison was more distressed by the loss of the treaty than of 
the man. Perhaps this diplomat, patriot, and man of letters had stayed 
away for too long.

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